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As a youngster, I consumed books until my vision grew hazy. Once my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the stamina of a monk, revising for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve observed that ability for deep focus dissolve into endless scrolling on my phone. My attention span now shrinks like a snail at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like nourishment 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 aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a term I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few moments reviewing the collection back in an attempt to imprint the word into my recall.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been subtly life-changing. The payoff is less about showing off with uncommon adjectives – 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 term, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of spotting, documenting and revising it breaks the slide into inactive, superficial attention.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it functions as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an easy routine to keep up. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a word test.

Realistically, I integrate maybe 5% of these terms into my daily conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “mournful” as well. But the majority of them stay like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my thinking much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less frequently for the same overused handful of adjectives, and more often for something exact and strong. Few things are more gratifying than unearthing the perfect word you were searching for – like locating the missing component that locks the image into place.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our focus with merciless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use mine as a tool for slow thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after years of slack scrolling, is finally stirring again.