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When I was a child, I devoured books until my eyes blurred. Once my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, studying for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for intense concentration dissolve into endless scrolling on my device. My focus now contracts like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Reading for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for someone who creates content for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing fancy, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reading the collection back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny ritual has been subtly life-changing. The payoff is less about showing off with obscure descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, documenting and reviewing it breaks the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

There is also a journalling aspect to it – it functions as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is often very impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to stop in the middle, take out my device and type “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I often neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I incorporate maybe 5% of these words into my daily conversation. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “mournful” too. But the majority of them remain like exhibits – admired and listed but seldom used.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much keener. I find myself reaching less frequently for the same tired selection of descriptors, and more often for something precise and muscular. Few things are more gratifying than unearthing the perfect word you were seeking – like locating the lost puzzle piece that locks the picture into position.

In an era when our gadgets drain our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a intellect that, after a long time of slack scrolling, is at last stirring again.