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When I was a youngster, I devoured books until my vision grew hazy. When my GCSEs came around, I exercised the endurance of a monk, revising for lengthy periods without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for intense concentration fade into infinite browsing on my phone. My focus now contracts like a snail at the touch of a finger. Reading for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for someone who creates content for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. 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 came across a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an casual discussion – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reviewing the list back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been subtly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure descriptors – which, let’s face it, 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 faint expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, documenting and reviewing it breaks the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed attention.

There is also a journalling element to it – it acts as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been listening to.

It's not as if it’s an easy routine to maintain. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to stop in the middle, take out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the person squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a word test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe 5% of these words into my daily speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them remain like exhibits – appreciated and catalogued but seldom used.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my thinking much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less frequently for the same tired handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Few things are more gratifying than unearthing the perfect word you were searching for – like locating the missing puzzle piece that locks the image into place.

In an era when our gadgets drain our attention with relentless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use mine as a tool for slow thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the joy of engaging a mind that, after years of slack scrolling, is finally waking up again.