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When I was a child, I consumed novels until my vision grew hazy. When my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a monk, studying for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for intense concentration fade into infinite scrolling on my phone. My focus now shrinks 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 a person who creates content for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to regain that cognitive flexibility, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a term I didn’t understand – 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, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reading the list back in an attempt to imprint the word into my recall.

The record now spans almost twenty sheets, and this tiny ritual has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with uncommon adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I search for and record a term, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in conversation, the very process of noticing, documenting and revising it breaks the drift into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping 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.

Not that it’s an simple routine to keep up. It is often very impractical. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause mid-paragraph, take out my device and enter “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I often forget to do), conscientiously browsing through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate maybe five percent of these terms into my daily speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” too. But most of them stay like exhibits – admired and listed but rarely used.

Still, it’s made my thinking much keener. I find myself reaching less often for the same tired selection of adjectives, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect word you were searching for – like finding the lost component that locks the picture into position.

At a time when our gadgets siphon off our focus with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has given me back something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after a long time of slack browsing, is at last stirring again.