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When I was a child, I consumed novels until my vision blurred. When my exams came around, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, revising for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for intense concentration fade into endless scrolling on my device. My focus now contracts like a slug at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for a person who creates content for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a term I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an article, or an casual 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 phone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few minutes reading the list back in an effort to imprint the word into my memory.

The record now covers almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been subtly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with uncommon adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I search for and record a word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “phantom” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, logging and revising it interrupts the drift into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping aspect to it – it functions as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that 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, take out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my pace to a frustrating speed. (The Kindle, with its integrated dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a word test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these terms into my everyday speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” too. But most of them stay like exhibits – admired and catalogued but rarely handled.

Still, it’s rendered my thinking much keener. I find myself reaching less often for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the exact term you were seeking – like locating the missing component that snaps the picture into place.

At a time when our devices siphon off our focus with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for deliberate thought. And it has given me back something I feared I’d forfeited – the joy of engaging a mind that, after a long time of lazy browsing, is finally stirring again.