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As a child, I consumed novels until my eyes blurred. Once my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, studying for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for intense concentration dissolve into endless browsing on my device. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who creates content for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t know – whether in a book, an article, or an casual discussion – I would research it and write it down. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reviewing the collection back in an effort to lodge the word into my memory.

The list now covers almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, logging and revising it interrupts the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

There is also a journalling element to it – it acts as something of a diary, 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 maintain. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, take out my device and type “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can reduce my pace to a frustrating speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully browsing through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe five percent of these terms into my everyday conversation. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and listed but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my thinking much keener. I notice I'm reaching less often for the same overused selection of adjectives, and more often for something exact and muscular. Few things are more gratifying than unearthing the perfect word you were searching for – like locating the missing component that locks the image into position.

At a time when our devices drain our attention with merciless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after a long time of slack scrolling, is at last waking up again.