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When I was a child, I consumed books until my eyes grew hazy. When my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for intense concentration dissolve into endless scrolling on my device. My focus now contracts like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Reading for pleasure feels 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 mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a book, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would look it up and record it. Nothing fancy, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reviewing the list back in an effort to imprint the word into my recall.

The record now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, documenting and reviewing it interrupts the drift into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it acts as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been listening to.

It's not as if it’s an easy habit to maintain. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my device and enter “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person pressed against me. It can reduce my pace to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, 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 vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate maybe 5% of these words into my daily speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them stay like exhibits – appreciated and listed but rarely handled.

Still, it’s made my mind much keener. I find myself reaching less often for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something exact and strong. Rarely are more gratifying than unearthing the perfect term you were searching for – like finding the lost puzzle piece that snaps the image into place.

At a time when our gadgets siphon off our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the joy of engaging a intellect that, after years of slack scrolling, is finally stirring again.