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As a child, I consumed novels until my eyes grew hazy. When my exams came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, studying for hours without a break. But in lately, I’ve observed that capacity for intense focus dissolve into infinite scrolling on my device. My focus now contracts like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Engaging with books for enjoyment feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an piece, or an casual discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reading the collection back in an effort to imprint the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this small habit has been subtly life-changing. The benefit is less about showing off with uncommon adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise 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 stirring again. Even if I never use “phantom” in conversation, the very process of spotting, documenting and revising it breaks the slide into passive, superficial attention.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it acts as something of a diary, 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 reading on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my device and type “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can reduce my pace to a maddening crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a word test.

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

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my mind much keener. I find myself reaching less often for the same overused handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the perfect term you were searching for – like locating the missing component that locks the image into position.

At a time when our gadgets siphon off our attention with merciless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a intellect that, after a long time of lazy browsing, is at last stirring again.