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When I was a child, I devoured novels until my vision blurred. When my exams arrived, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, revising for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for intense concentration dissolve into infinite browsing on my phone. My attention span now contracts like a slug at the tap of a finger. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for someone who writes for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to regain that cognitive flexibility, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few minutes reading the list back in an effort to imprint the word into my recall.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I look up and note a term, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, documenting and reviewing it interrupts the slide into passive, superficial focus.

Additionally, there's a journalling aspect 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.

It's not as if it’s an simple routine to maintain. It is often very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to stop mid-paragraph, pull out my device and enter “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the stranger squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The Kindle, with its integrated dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate maybe five percent of these words into my daily conversation. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them stay like exhibits – admired and catalogued but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my mind much keener. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more often for something exact and strong. Few things are more gratifying than unearthing the exact term you were searching for – like locating the lost puzzle piece that snaps the picture into position.

At a time when our devices drain our focus with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after a long time of slack browsing, is finally waking up again.