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As a youngster, I consumed books until my eyes blurred. When my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without a break. But in lately, I’ve watched that ability for intense concentration dissolve into endless scrolling on my device. My attention span now shrinks 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 a person who writes for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to restore that cognitive flexibility, to stop the brain rot.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an article, or an casual conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing fancy, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, ironically, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few moments reading the list back in an effort to imprint the word into my memory.

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 sound insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I look up and record a term, I feel a slight stretch, as though some underused part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never use “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of spotting, logging and revising it interrupts the slide into inactive, semi-skimmed focus.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it acts as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an easy habit to maintain. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, take out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its integrated dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), dutifully scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps 5% of these terms into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and listed but rarely handled.

Still, it’s made my thinking much keener. I find myself reaching less frequently for the same overused selection of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and strong. Few things are more gratifying than unearthing the exact word you were seeking – like finding the lost component that snaps the picture into position.

In an era when our devices drain our focus with relentless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use mine as a tool for slow thinking. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after years of slack scrolling, is at last waking up again.