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As a child, I devoured books until my eyes grew hazy. When my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, revising for hours without a break. But in lately, I’ve watched that ability for intense concentration dissolve into endless scrolling on my phone. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the tap of a finger. Engaging with books for enjoyment feels less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for a person who creates content for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to restore that cognitive flexibility, to stop the brain rot.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a term I didn’t know – whether in a book, an article, or an casual conversation – I would look it up and record it. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reviewing the collection back in an attempt to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The record now spans almost twenty sheets, and this small ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and record a term, I feel a slight stretch, as though some neglected part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of spotting, documenting and reviewing it breaks the drift into passive, superficial focus.

There is also a journalling element to it – it acts as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my device and type “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The Kindle, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a word test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe 5% of these terms into my everyday speech. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But the majority of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and listed but seldom handled.

Still, it’s rendered my thinking much sharper. I find myself reaching less often for the same overused selection of adjectives, and more frequently for something exact and strong. Few things are more gratifying than discovering the exact word you were searching for – like finding the lost puzzle piece that snaps the picture into position.

At a time when our devices drain our attention with merciless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the joy of exercising a mind that, after years of slack browsing, is at last waking up again.