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As a youngster, I consumed books until my eyes grew hazy. Once my exams came around, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without pause. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for deep focus fade into infinite browsing on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for someone who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a book, an article, or an casual conversation – I would research it and record it. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few minutes reading the list back in an effort to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny habit has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I search for and note a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in conversation, the very process of spotting, logging and reviewing it interrupts the drift into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

Additionally, there's a journalling aspect to it – it acts as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an simple habit to keep up. It is often extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to stop in the middle, take out my phone and type “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the stranger squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often forget to do), dutifully browsing through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps 5% of these terms into my everyday conversation. “Incorrigible” 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 sharper. I notice I'm turning less often for the same tired selection of adjectives, and more frequently for something exact and strong. Rarely are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect term you were seeking – like locating the missing component that snaps the picture into place.

At a time when our gadgets siphon off our focus with relentless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use mine as a tool for slow thought. And it has given me back something I feared I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after years of slack browsing, is finally waking up again.