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When I was a youngster, I devoured books until my vision blurred. Once my exams arrived, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that ability for deep focus dissolve into infinite browsing on my device. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Reading for enjoyment feels less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for someone who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to stop the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard conversation – I would research it and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, ironically, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few minutes reviewing the collection back in an effort to imprint the word into my memory.

The list now spans almost twenty sheets, and this small habit has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I look up and record a term, I feel a slight stretch, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very process of noticing, documenting and reviewing it interrupts the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed focus.

There is also a diary-keeping aspect to it – it functions as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been listening to.

It's not as if it’s an easy routine to keep up. It is often extremely impractical. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to stop mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the stranger pressed against me. It can reduce my pace to a maddening speed. (The Kindle, with its integrated dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps five percent of these terms into my everyday speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” too. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but rarely used.

Nevertheless, it’s made my mind much sharper. I find myself turning less often for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more often for something exact and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the exact term you were searching for – like locating the missing component that locks the image into place.

In an era when our devices drain our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the joy of engaging a intellect that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is at last stirring again.