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When I was a youngster, I consumed books until my vision blurred. Once my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the endurance of a monk, 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 attention span now contracts like a slug at the tap of a finger. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for someone who writes for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the brain rot.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a book, an piece, or an overheard discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, ironically, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few moments reading the collection back in an attempt to imprint the word into my recall.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, and this small habit has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with uncommon 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 term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very act of noticing, documenting and reviewing it breaks the slide into passive, superficial attention.

Additionally, there's a journalling aspect to it – it functions as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an simple habit to keep up. It is often extremely impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, take out my phone and type “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the stranger squeezed against me. It can reduce my pace to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often forget to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe five percent of these words into my daily conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” as well. But the majority of them stay like museum pieces – admired and listed but seldom used.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much sharper. I find myself reaching less often for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something exact and strong. Few things are more gratifying than discovering the exact term you were searching for – like locating the lost component that snaps the image into place.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our attention 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 forfeited – the pleasure of exercising a intellect that, after a long time of lazy browsing, is at last waking up again.