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As a youngster, I devoured books until my eyes grew hazy. When my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, studying for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for deep concentration dissolve into endless scrolling on my phone. My attention span 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 a person who writes for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a small promise: every time I came across a term I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an piece, or an casual discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few minutes reading the collection back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now spans almost twenty sheets, and this small habit has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I search for and record a word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in conversation, the very act of noticing, documenting and revising it interrupts the slide into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

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

It's not as if it’s an simple habit to keep up. It is often extremely inconvenient. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to stop in the middle, pull out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a word test.

In practice, I integrate maybe 5% of these terms into my daily conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “mournful” as well. But most of them remain like exhibits – admired and catalogued but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much keener. I find myself reaching less often for the same tired handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something precise and strong. Few things are more gratifying than discovering the perfect word you were seeking – like finding the missing component that locks the image into position.

At a time when our gadgets siphon off our focus with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for slow thinking. And it has given me back something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after a long time of lazy browsing, is finally stirring again.