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As a child, I devoured books until my eyes grew hazy. Once my exams arrived, I exercised the endurance of a monk, studying for hours without pause. But in lately, I’ve watched that ability for intense concentration dissolve into infinite scrolling on my device. My attention span now shrinks like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to regain that cognitive flexibility, to halt the brain rot.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I encountered 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 elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reviewing the list back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been quietly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I look up and record a word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, logging and reviewing it breaks the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed focus.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it acts as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an simple routine to keep up. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to stop mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the person pressed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening speed. (The Kindle, with its integrated dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps 5% of these words into my everyday speech. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them stay like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but rarely used.

Still, it’s made my mind much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less frequently for the same tired selection of descriptors, and more often for something precise and strong. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the perfect term you were seeking – like finding the missing puzzle piece that snaps the image into place.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for slow thinking. And it has given me back something I worried I’d forfeited – the pleasure of exercising a intellect that, after years of slack scrolling, is finally waking up again.