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When I was a youngster, I devoured books until my vision blurred. When my GCSEs came around, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, revising for hours without pause. But in lately, I’ve watched that ability for intense concentration dissolve into infinite scrolling on my device. My focus now contracts like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who creates content for a profession, 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.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a term I didn’t know – whether in a book, an piece, or an overheard discussion – I would research it and record it. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reviewing the collection back in an attempt to imprint the word into my memory.

The list now covers almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been quietly life-changing. The payoff is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I search for and note a term, I feel a slight stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in conversation, the very act of noticing, documenting and revising it breaks the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping element to it – it acts as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a word test.

Realistically, I incorporate maybe 5% of these words into my everyday conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them stay like museum pieces – appreciated and listed but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less often for the same overused selection of adjectives, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the exact term you were searching for – like locating the missing component that locks the image into place.

At a time when our gadgets drain our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the joy of engaging a mind that, after years of slack browsing, is finally waking up again.