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When I was a child, I consumed novels until my eyes grew hazy. Once my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a monk, revising for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve observed that ability for intense concentration dissolve into infinite scrolling on my phone. My attention span now shrinks like a snail at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who writes for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to restore 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 piece, or an overheard conversation – I would research it and record it. Not a thing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reviewing the collection back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been quietly life-changing. The payoff is less about peacocking with obscure descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and record a term, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never use “phantom” in conversation, the very act of noticing, documenting and reviewing it interrupts the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed focus.

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

Not that it’s an simple habit to keep up. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to stop in the middle, pull out my device and type “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my pace to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a word test.

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

Still, it’s made my thinking much keener. I notice I'm reaching less frequently for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more often for something precise and muscular. Few things are more gratifying than unearthing the exact term you were seeking – like locating the missing puzzle piece that locks the image into place.

At a time when our gadgets siphon off our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after years of slack browsing, is finally waking up again.