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When I was a child, I devoured books until my vision grew hazy. Once my exams arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a monk, revising for hours without pause. But in lately, I’ve observed that capacity for intense focus fade into endless browsing on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the tap of a finger. Reading for enjoyment feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to restore that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and record it. Nothing fancy, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reading the list back in an attempt to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I look up and record a term, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of spotting, logging and reviewing it breaks the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

There is also a journalling aspect to it – it functions as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is often very impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my phone and type “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the stranger squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The Kindle, with its integrated 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 studying for a word test.

In practice, I integrate maybe 5% of these words into my everyday speech. “unreformable” was adopted. “mournful” as well. But the majority of them stay like exhibits – appreciated and catalogued but seldom handled.

Still, it’s made my mind much keener. I find myself reaching less frequently for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more often for something exact and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the exact word you were seeking – like locating the missing component that locks the image into place.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our attention with merciless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the joy of engaging a mind that, after years of slack scrolling, is finally stirring again.