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As a child, I devoured novels until my eyes grew hazy. When my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, studying for hours without a break. But in lately, I’ve watched that capacity for intense focus fade into infinite browsing on my device. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the tap of a finger. Reading for enjoyment feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who creates content for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to regain that mental elasticity, to stop the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and record it. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reviewing the collection back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny ritual has been quietly life-changing. The payoff is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I look up and record a word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in conversation, the very process of spotting, documenting and reviewing it breaks the slide into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

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

It's not as if it’s an easy routine to keep up. It is frequently extremely inconvenient. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to stop in the middle, 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 reading to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these words into my everyday conversation. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but rarely handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I find myself reaching less often for the same tired selection of descriptors, and more often for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the perfect word you were searching for – like locating the missing component that snaps the image into place.

At a time when our devices drain our attention with merciless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use mine as a tool for slow thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after years of lazy scrolling, is finally waking up again.