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When I was a youngster, I devoured books until my vision grew hazy. When my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the endurance of a monk, studying for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve observed that ability for deep concentration dissolve into infinite browsing on my phone. My focus now contracts like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Reading for pleasure feels 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 mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.

So, about a year ago, I made a small promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t know – whether in a book, an article, or an casual conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record kept, ironically, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few moments reviewing the collection back in an effort to lodge the word into my recall.

The record now spans almost twenty sheets, and this small habit has been subtly life-changing. The payoff is less about showing off with uncommon descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very process of noticing, logging and revising it breaks the slide into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

Additionally, there's a journalling aspect to it – it acts as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an simple habit to keep up. It is often very inconvenient. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, take out my device and enter “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the stranger squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a word test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps 5% of these words into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and listed but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my mind much keener. I find myself turning less often for the same tired handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and strong. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the perfect term you were seeking – like locating the lost component that locks the image into place.

At a time when our devices siphon off our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a tool for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after years of lazy scrolling, is finally stirring again.