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When I was a youngster, I devoured novels until my vision blurred. When my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, revising for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that ability for intense focus dissolve into endless browsing on my device. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the touch of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for someone who creates content for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.

So, about a year ago, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an piece, or an casual discussion – I would research it and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few minutes reading the collection back in an effort to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now spans almost twenty sheets, and this small ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and record a word, I feel a slight stretch, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in conversation, the very process of spotting, logging and revising it interrupts the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed focus.

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 thinking about and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an simple habit to keep up. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my device and type “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), conscientiously scrolling through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a word test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps 5% of these words into my everyday speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” as well. But the majority of them remain like exhibits – admired and catalogued but rarely used.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I find myself turning less often for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and strong. Rarely are more gratifying than unearthing the exact term you were searching for – like locating the missing component that snaps the picture into place.

In an era when our gadgets drain our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use mine as a tool for slow thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after years of lazy scrolling, is at last waking up again.