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As a child, I devoured novels until my eyes grew hazy. When my exams arrived, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for deep concentration fade into infinite scrolling on my phone. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the touch of a thumb. Reading for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. 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 restore that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a modest promise: every time I encountered a term I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would research it and write it down. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a running list maintained, amusingly, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few minutes reading the collection back in an attempt to imprint the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny ritual has been subtly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with uncommon adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I look up and record a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, documenting and reviewing it interrupts the slide into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it acts as something of a journal, a record 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 simple habit to keep up. It is often very impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person pressed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I often neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps 5% of these words into my everyday speech. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them stay like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but seldom used.

Still, it’s rendered my thinking much sharper. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same tired selection of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect term you were seeking – like locating the missing component that locks the picture into place.

In an era when our devices 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 joy of exercising a intellect that, after years of slack browsing, is at last waking up again.