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As a youngster, I consumed novels until my eyes blurred. Once my exams came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without pause. But in lately, I’ve observed that capacity for deep focus dissolve into infinite scrolling on my phone. My attention span now shrinks like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Reading for enjoyment feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to regain that mental elasticity, to stop the brain rot.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few minutes reviewing the list back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The record now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I search for and record a term, I feel a slight expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, documenting and reviewing it breaks the drift into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

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

Not that it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to stop 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 reduce my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often forget to do), conscientiously scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate maybe five percent of these terms into my everyday speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and listed but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my thinking much keener. I find myself reaching less frequently for the same tired selection of descriptors, and more often for something exact and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the exact word you were searching for – like finding the missing component that locks the image into position.

In an era when our devices drain our focus with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d forfeited – the joy of exercising a mind that, after years of lazy browsing, is at last waking up again.