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When I was a child, I consumed novels until my vision blurred. Once my GCSEs came around, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without pause. But in lately, I’ve watched that capacity for deep focus dissolve into infinite browsing on my device. My focus now contracts like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for a person 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 stop the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a modest vow: every time I came across a term I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an article, or an casual conversation – I would look it up and record it. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few minutes reading the list back in an effort to imprint the word into my recall.

The record now covers almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, logging and revising it interrupts the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping element to it – it acts as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an easy routine to maintain. It is often very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to stop in the middle, pull out my device and enter “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the person squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often neglect to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a word test.

Realistically, I incorporate maybe five percent of these words into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But the majority of them stay like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but rarely handled.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much sharper. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same tired selection of adjectives, and more often for something precise and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the perfect term you were searching for – like locating the lost component that snaps the picture into place.

In an era when our devices drain our focus with merciless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the joy of exercising a mind that, after a long time of lazy browsing, is finally waking up again.