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When I was a child, I devoured books until my vision grew hazy. Once my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the stamina of a monk, revising for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for intense concentration dissolve into endless scrolling on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the tap of a finger. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for someone 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 halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a small vow: every time I came across a term I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, ironically, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d devote a few minutes reviewing the list back in an attempt to lodge the word into my memory.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this small ritual has been quietly life-changing. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure descriptors – which, to be honest, 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 faint expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in conversation, the very act of spotting, logging and revising it breaks the slide into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

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

Not that it’s an easy routine to keep up. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my device and type “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening speed. (The Kindle, with its integrated lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently forget to do), conscientiously scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe 5% of these words into my daily conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them remain like exhibits – appreciated and catalogued but rarely used.

Still, it’s made my mind much keener. I notice I'm turning 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 word you were searching for – like locating the missing puzzle piece that locks the image into position.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our attention with merciless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for slow thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after a long time of lazy browsing, is finally waking up again.