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When I was a child, I devoured books until my vision blurred. Once my GCSEs came around, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in recent years, I’ve observed that ability for intense focus dissolve into endless scrolling on my device. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for enjoyment feels less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for a person who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to restore that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a modest promise: every time I encountered a term I didn’t know – whether in a book, an article, or an casual conversation – I would research it and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reviewing the collection back in an attempt to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The record now covers almost 20 pages, and this small habit has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in conversation, the very act of spotting, documenting and reviewing it breaks the slide into inactive, semi-skimmed attention.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping element to it – it functions as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the stranger squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a frustrating speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a word test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these terms into my everyday conversation. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them remain like exhibits – admired and catalogued but rarely handled.

Still, it’s rendered my thinking much keener. I find myself reaching less often for the same tired selection of adjectives, and more often for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the perfect term you were seeking – like locating the lost puzzle piece that locks the picture into place.

At a time when our devices drain our focus with relentless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use mine as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after a long time of slack scrolling, is at last stirring again.