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When I was a child, I devoured novels until my eyes grew hazy. Once my GCSEs came around, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, studying for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for intense concentration fade into endless scrolling on my device. My focus now shrinks like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Reading for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to restore that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I encountered a term I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing fancy, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few minutes reviewing the collection back in an attempt to lodge the word into my memory.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny ritual has been subtly transformative. The payoff is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I search for and record a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some neglected part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never use “phantom” in conversation, the very process of noticing, documenting and revising it breaks the drift into passive, superficial focus.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping element to it – it acts as something of a journal, a record 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 very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my phone and type “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often neglect to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a word test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps 5% of these terms into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them stay like museum pieces – appreciated and listed but rarely used.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my mind much sharper. I notice I'm turning less often for the same overused selection of adjectives, and more often for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than unearthing the perfect term you were searching for – like finding the lost puzzle piece that locks the picture into position.

At a time when our gadgets drain our attention with merciless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d forfeited – the joy of engaging a intellect that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is finally waking up again.