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When I was a youngster, I consumed books until my vision grew hazy. Once my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, revising for hours without a break. But in lately, I’ve watched that ability for intense focus dissolve into infinite browsing on my phone. My focus now contracts like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Reading for enjoyment feels less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for someone who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to restore that cognitive flexibility, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I encountered a term I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an piece, or an overheard discussion – I would research it and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reading the collection back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, logging and reviewing it breaks the slide into inactive, superficial attention.

There is also a journalling element to it – it functions 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.

It's not as if it’s an simple habit to keep up. It is frequently extremely inconvenient. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, take out my device and enter “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the person squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The Kindle, with its integrated dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), dutifully browsing through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I incorporate maybe five percent of these words into my daily conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But the majority of them remain like exhibits – appreciated and listed but rarely handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I find myself turning less frequently for the same overused handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something exact and strong. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the perfect term you were searching for – like finding the lost puzzle piece that snaps the image into position.

In an era when our devices siphon off our attention with relentless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use my own as a instrument for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after a long time of slack scrolling, is at last stirring again.