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When I was a child, I devoured books until my eyes grew hazy. When my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, studying for hours without a break. But in lately, I’ve observed that capacity for intense focus fade into infinite scrolling on my device. My focus now contracts like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for someone who writes for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an article, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few moments reading the list back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now spans almost twenty sheets, and this tiny ritual has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about showing off with uncommon descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never use “phantom” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, documenting and revising it breaks the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

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

Not that it’s an simple routine to keep up. It is often extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, take out my phone and type “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening speed. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I often forget to do), conscientiously scrolling through my expanding word-hoard like I’m studying for a word test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps 5% of these words into my daily speech. “unreformable” made the cut. “mournful” as well. But most of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and listed but seldom used.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much sharper. I notice I'm turning less often for the same overused selection of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the perfect term you were searching for – like finding the lost component that locks the picture into place.

At a time when our devices drain our attention with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for deliberate thinking. And it has given me back something I worried I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after years of lazy browsing, is at last stirring again.