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As a youngster, I devoured novels until my vision blurred. When my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for intense focus fade into endless scrolling on my device. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the touch of a finger. Reading for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who writes for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t know – whether in a book, an piece, or an casual conversation – I would research it and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reading the collection back in an attempt to lodge the word into my memory.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny ritual has been subtly life-changing. The benefit is less about showing off with uncommon descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some neglected part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in conversation, the very process of spotting, logging and revising it breaks the drift into passive, superficial attention.

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

It's not as if it’s an easy routine to keep up. It is often extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to stop in the middle, pull out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the person pressed against me. It can reduce my pace to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously scrolling through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate maybe five percent of these words into my daily conversation. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them stay like exhibits – admired and catalogued but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my thinking much sharper. I find myself reaching less often for the same tired handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something precise and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than unearthing the exact word you were seeking – like finding the lost puzzle piece that locks the picture into place.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for slow thought. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after a long time of slack browsing, is finally waking up again.