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As a child, I consumed novels until my eyes blurred. Once my exams arrived, I exercised the stamina of a monk, revising for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for deep focus fade into infinite browsing on my device. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the touch of a finger. Reading for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for someone who writes for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to stop the brain rot.

So, about a year ago, I made a small promise: every time I encountered a term I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an casual discussion – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, ironically, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few moments reading the collection back in an effort to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with uncommon adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some underused part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in conversation, the very act of spotting, logging and reviewing it breaks the slide into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

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

It's not as if it’s an easy habit to maintain. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to stop in the middle, pull out my device and type “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often neglect to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate perhaps 5% of these words into my everyday speech. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them remain like exhibits – admired and listed but rarely used.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much keener. I notice I'm reaching less often for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the exact term you were searching for – like locating the lost component that snaps the picture into place.

In an era when our devices drain our focus with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for slow thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the pleasure of exercising a intellect that, after years of lazy scrolling, is at last waking up again.