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As a child, I devoured books until my vision blurred. When my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the endurance of a monk, revising for hours without a break. But in lately, I’ve watched that ability for intense focus fade into endless scrolling on my device. My focus now contracts like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Reading for enjoyment 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 wanted to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an article, or an casual conversation – I would research it and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reviewing the collection back in an effort to imprint the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, and this small habit has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never use “phantom” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, logging and reviewing it interrupts the slide into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

There is also a journalling element to it – it acts 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 routine to keep up. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my phone and type “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can slow my pace to a frustrating speed. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a word test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these words into my everyday speech. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them remain like exhibits – appreciated and catalogued but rarely used.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my thinking much sharper. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same overused handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Few things are more gratifying than discovering the perfect word you were searching for – like locating the lost puzzle piece that snaps the image into position.

In an era when our gadgets drain our attention with merciless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use my own as a instrument for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is at last stirring again.