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As a child, I consumed novels until my eyes blurred. Once my GCSEs came around, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, revising for hours without a break. But in lately, I’ve watched that ability for deep concentration fade into endless browsing on my phone. My focus now contracts like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Reading for pleasure 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 wanted to restore that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I encountered a term I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would research it and record it. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few minutes reading the collection back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been quietly life-changing. The payoff is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and note a term, I feel a slight stretch, as though some neglected part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never use “phantom” in dialogue, the very process of noticing, logging and revising it interrupts the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed attention.

There is also a diary-keeping element to it – it acts as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an simple routine to keep up. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause mid-paragraph, take out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my pace to a frustrating crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate perhaps 5% of these words into my daily speech. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but rarely used.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less often for the same overused selection of adjectives, and more frequently for something exact and strong. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the exact word you were searching for – like finding the lost puzzle piece that locks the image into position.

In an era when our devices siphon off our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use my own as a instrument for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after years of slack scrolling, is finally stirring again.