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When I was a child, I devoured books until my eyes blurred. When my GCSEs came around, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in lately, I’ve watched that ability for intense focus dissolve into infinite scrolling on my device. My attention span now shrinks like a slug at the touch of a finger. Reading for enjoyment feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record kept, ironically, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reading the collection back in an effort to imprint the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now covers almost 20 pages, and this small habit has been subtly life-changing. The payoff is less about peacocking with obscure descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I look up and record a word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some neglected part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, logging and revising it interrupts the slide into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

There is also a journalling element to it – it acts as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to stop in the middle, take out my device and type “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the stranger squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often forget to do), dutifully browsing through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate maybe five percent of these words into my everyday conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but rarely handled.

Still, it’s made my mind much sharper. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same overused selection of descriptors, and more often for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more satisfying than unearthing the exact term you were searching for – like finding the missing component that snaps the picture into position.

At a time when our devices siphon off our attention with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the joy of engaging a mind that, after a long time of slack scrolling, is at last waking up again.