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As a child, I consumed novels until my vision blurred. When my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the endurance of a monk, studying for hours without pause. But in lately, I’ve observed that capacity for deep focus fade into infinite scrolling on my device. My focus now contracts like a snail at the touch of a finger. Reading for pleasure seems less like nourishment 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 regain that cognitive flexibility, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I came across a term I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would look it up and record it. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few moments reviewing the collection back in an effort to imprint the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this small habit has been quietly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I search for and note a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in conversation, the very act of spotting, documenting and revising it breaks the drift into inactive, superficial attention.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping element to it – it functions as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an simple routine to keep up. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, take out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the stranger squeezed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), conscientiously scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe 5% of these terms into my daily speech. “unreformable” made the cut. “mournful” as well. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less often for the same overused selection of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than unearthing the exact word you were seeking – like finding the missing puzzle piece 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 restored to me something I feared I’d forfeited – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after years of lazy browsing, is finally stirring again.