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When I was a child, I consumed novels until my eyes grew hazy. When my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without pause. But in lately, I’ve observed that ability for intense focus fade into endless scrolling on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for someone who writes for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t know – whether in a book, an piece, or an casual discussion – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reading the collection back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now spans almost twenty sheets, and this tiny ritual has been quietly life-changing. The payoff is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I look up and note a term, I feel a slight expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of spotting, logging and reviewing it breaks the drift into passive, superficial focus.

There is also a diary-keeping aspect to it – it acts 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.

Not that it’s an easy routine to keep up. It is often very inconvenient. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, take out my device and type “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the person pressed against me. It can slow my pace to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often neglect to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps 5% of these words into my everyday conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them remain like exhibits – appreciated and listed but rarely used.

Still, it’s made my mind much sharper. I find myself reaching less often for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more often for something precise and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect word you were searching for – like locating the missing puzzle piece that snaps the picture into position.

At a time when our gadgets drain our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after years of slack scrolling, is finally stirring again.