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As a youngster, I devoured novels until my eyes blurred. When my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for intense focus dissolve into infinite browsing on my device. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the tap of a finger. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for a person who writes for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that cognitive flexibility, to halt the brain rot.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I encountered a term I didn’t know – whether in a book, an piece, or an overheard discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reading the collection back in an attempt to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The record now spans almost twenty sheets, and this small habit has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I search for and note a term, I feel a faint expansion, as though some neglected part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in conversation, the very act of noticing, documenting and reviewing it interrupts the slide into inactive, superficial attention.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping element to it – it functions as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an simple routine to maintain. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating speed. (The Kindle, with its integrated lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate perhaps 5% of these words into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them stay like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but rarely used.

Still, it’s made my thinking much keener. I notice I'm turning less often for the same overused handful of adjectives, and more often for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the exact term you were seeking – like finding the lost puzzle piece that locks the picture into place.

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