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When I was a youngster, I consumed novels until my eyes blurred. When my exams came around, I exercised the stamina of a monk, studying for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for deep focus dissolve into endless scrolling on my device. My attention span now contracts like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Engaging with books for enjoyment feels less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for a person who creates content for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to restore that cognitive flexibility, to halt the brain rot.

Therefore, about a year ago, 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 look it up and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a running list kept, ironically, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few minutes reading the collection back in an effort to imprint the word into my recall.

The record now spans almost twenty sheets, and this small ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a slight stretch, as though some neglected part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never use “phantom” in dialogue, the very process of noticing, logging and revising it interrupts the slide into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

There is also a journalling aspect to it – it functions as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been listening to.

It's not as if it’s an simple routine to maintain. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, take out my device and enter “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the stranger squeezed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often forget to do), dutifully browsing through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a word test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these words into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them stay like exhibits – admired and catalogued but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my mind much keener. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same overused handful of adjectives, and more often for something precise and strong. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the exact term you were seeking – like finding the missing component that locks the image into position.

At a time when our devices siphon off our attention with relentless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use mine as a instrument for deliberate thought. And it has given me back something I worried I’d lost – the joy of engaging a intellect that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is at last waking up again.