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When I was a child, I consumed books until my vision blurred. Once my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, revising for hours without pause. But in lately, I’ve observed that ability for intense focus dissolve into infinite browsing on my phone. My attention span now shrinks like a snail at the touch of a thumb. Engaging with books for enjoyment feels less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for someone who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to regain that cognitive flexibility, to halt the brain rot.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a book, an article, or an casual conversation – I would research it and write it down. Not a thing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few minutes reviewing the list back in an attempt to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, and this small ritual has been subtly life-changing. The payoff is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and note a term, I feel a slight expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in conversation, the very act of noticing, documenting and revising it breaks the slide into inactive, superficial focus.

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 thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an easy routine to maintain. It is often extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to stop in the middle, pull out my phone and type “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the person pressed against me. It can slow my pace to a frustrating speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often neglect to do), conscientiously scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate maybe five percent of these terms into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “mournful” as well. But most of them stay like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but seldom handled.

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

At a time when our gadgets drain our attention with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for slow thought. And it has given me back something I feared I’d forfeited – the joy of exercising a mind that, after years of lazy browsing, is finally waking up again.