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As a child, I devoured novels until my vision blurred. When my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, revising for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for deep concentration fade into endless browsing on my device. My focus now contracts like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to regain that cognitive flexibility, to halt the brain rot.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I encountered a term I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an article, or an casual conversation – I would research it and write it down. Not a thing fancy, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a running list kept, ironically, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reading the list back in an effort to imprint the word into my recall.

The record now spans almost twenty sheets, and this small ritual has been subtly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I look up and record a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, logging and revising it breaks the slide into passive, superficial attention.

There is also a journalling element to it – it functions as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

It's not as if it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to stop in the middle, take out my phone and enter “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 easier). And then there’s the revising (which I often neglect to do), dutifully browsing through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate perhaps 5% of these terms into my everyday conversation. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “mournful” too. But most of them stay like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but rarely handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much keener. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and strong. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect word you were searching for – like finding the lost puzzle piece that locks the image into place.

At a time when our devices siphon off our focus with relentless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has given me back something I worried I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after years of slack browsing, is finally stirring again.