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As a child, I devoured books until my eyes grew hazy. When my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, studying for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for deep focus dissolve into endless scrolling on my device. My attention span now shrinks like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Reading for pleasure seems less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for a person who creates content 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.

So, about a year ago, I made a small vow: every time I came across a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an piece, or an casual discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing fancy, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record kept, ironically, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few moments reading the list back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with uncommon adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. 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 act of noticing, logging and revising it breaks the drift into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

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

It's not as if it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my phone and type “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), dutifully scrolling through my expanding word-hoard like I’m studying for a word test.

Realistically, I integrate perhaps five percent of these words into my everyday speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and listed but rarely used.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I find myself turning less frequently for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more often for something precise and strong. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the perfect word you were searching for – like locating the lost component that locks the image into place.

At a time when our devices drain our focus with merciless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after years of slack scrolling, is finally stirring again.