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As a child, I devoured novels until my vision grew hazy. Once my GCSEs came around, I exercised the stamina of a monk, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in lately, I’ve watched that capacity for intense focus dissolve into endless scrolling on my device. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the touch of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for someone who creates content for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t know – whether in a book, an piece, or an casual conversation – I would research it and record it. Not a thing fancy, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reading the list back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now spans almost twenty sheets, and this tiny habit has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I look up and record a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in dialogue, the very process of noticing, logging and reviewing it interrupts the drift into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping element to it – it functions 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 frequently very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, take out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the stranger squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening crawl. (The Kindle, with its integrated dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps 5% of these terms into my everyday speech. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them stay like exhibits – appreciated and catalogued but seldom used.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my mind much keener. I find myself reaching less frequently for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and strong. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the perfect term you were seeking – like finding the lost puzzle piece that snaps the image into place.

In an era when our devices drain our attention with relentless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after years of slack browsing, is finally stirring again.