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When I was a youngster, I devoured books until my vision blurred. Once my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, revising for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that ability for deep concentration dissolve into infinite browsing on my device. My focus now contracts like a slug at the tap of a finger. Reading for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and record it. Nothing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reading the collection back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny habit has been subtly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I search for and note a term, I feel a slight stretch, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “phantom” in dialogue, the very process of noticing, documenting and revising it interrupts the slide into passive, superficial attention.

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

Not that it’s an simple routine to maintain. It is often extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my device and type “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the person pressed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully browsing through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these terms into my daily conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them remain like exhibits – appreciated and catalogued but rarely used.

Still, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I find myself reaching less often for the same tired selection of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and strong. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the perfect word you were searching for – like finding the lost component that locks the picture into place.

In an era when our devices siphon off our attention with merciless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for slow thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the joy of exercising a intellect that, after years of lazy scrolling, is finally waking up again.