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As a child, I consumed novels until my vision blurred. Once my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a monk, studying for lengthy periods 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 contracts like a snail at the touch of a finger. Reading for enjoyment feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would research it and record it. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few moments reviewing the collection back in an attempt to lodge the word into my memory.

The list now spans almost twenty sheets, and this small ritual has been quietly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking 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 faint expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of spotting, documenting and revising it breaks the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed attention.

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

It's not as if it’s an easy routine to maintain. It is often very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the stranger squeezed against me. It can reduce my pace to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a word test.

Realistically, I integrate maybe 5% of these terms into my daily conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “mournful” too. But the majority of them stay like exhibits – appreciated and listed but seldom used.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much keener. I find myself turning less frequently for the same overused handful of adjectives, and more often for something exact and strong. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the perfect term you were seeking – like locating the missing component that snaps the picture into place.

At a time when our devices drain our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for slow thinking. And it has given me back something I worried I’d lost – the joy of exercising a mind that, after a long time of slack browsing, is at last waking up again.