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As a child, I devoured books until my vision grew hazy. Once my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, studying for hours without a break. But in lately, I’ve observed that ability for intense focus dissolve into endless browsing on my phone. My focus now contracts like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to restore that mental elasticity, to stop 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 casual conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record kept, ironically, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reading the list back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now spans almost twenty sheets, and this tiny habit has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with uncommon adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I search for and record a term, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of spotting, documenting and reviewing it breaks the drift into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping 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 routine to maintain. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I incorporate maybe five percent of these words into my everyday speech. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them stay like exhibits – appreciated and catalogued but seldom used.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my mind much keener. I notice I'm turning less often for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more often for something precise and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the exact term you were seeking – like finding the missing component that locks the picture into position.

At a time when our gadgets siphon off our attention with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for deliberate thought. And it has given me back something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after a long time of slack scrolling, is finally stirring again.