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As a child, I consumed novels until my vision blurred. Once my exams came around, I exercised the endurance of a monk, revising for lengthy periods without a break. But in lately, I’ve watched that ability for intense concentration fade into endless browsing on my device. My attention span now shrinks like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Engaging with books for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for a person who creates content for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the brain rot.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a modest vow: every time I came across a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an casual conversation – I would research it and record it. Not a thing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few minutes reading the collection back in an attempt to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now spans almost twenty sheets, and this tiny habit has been quietly transformative. The payoff 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 record a word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, documenting and reviewing it breaks the slide into passive, superficial focus.

There is also a diary-keeping aspect to it – it functions as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, take out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the person pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often forget to do), dutifully browsing through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps 5% of these terms into my everyday speech. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them stay like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but seldom used.

Still, it’s made my mind much keener. I notice I'm turning less often for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more often for something precise and strong. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the exact term you were seeking – like finding the lost component that locks the image into position.

In an era when our gadgets drain our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for slow thought. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is finally waking up again.