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When I was a youngster, I consumed novels until my vision grew hazy. When my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the stamina of a monk, revising for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for deep focus fade into endless browsing on my phone. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the touch of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who creates content for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a modest vow: every time I came across a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few minutes reading the list back in an effort to lodge the word into my memory.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this small habit has been subtly transformative. The payoff is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – 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 brain is stirring again. Even if I never use “phantom” in conversation, the very act of noticing, logging and revising it interrupts the slide into inactive, semi-skimmed attention.

There is also a diary-keeping element to it – it acts as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is often extremely inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, take out my device and enter “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating speed. (The Kindle, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I often forget to do), conscientiously scrolling through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a word test.

Realistically, I integrate maybe five percent of these terms into my everyday speech. “unreformable” was adopted. “mournful” too. But most of them stay like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but seldom used.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much keener. I notice I'm turning less often for the same overused handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and strong. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the exact word you were searching for – like locating the lost component that snaps the image into position.

In an era when our gadgets drain our focus with relentless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use my own as a instrument for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a intellect that, after years of lazy browsing, is at last waking up again.