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As a child, I consumed novels until my eyes grew hazy. When my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, revising for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for deep concentration fade into infinite browsing on my device. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for a person who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the brain rot.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I came across a term I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an article, or an overheard conversation – I would research it and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reviewing the list back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now spans almost twenty sheets, and this tiny habit has been quietly life-changing. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, logging and revising it breaks the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed focus.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping aspect to it – it acts as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been reading, 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 extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to stop mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the stranger squeezed against me. It can slow my pace to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully browsing through my growing word-hoard like I’m preparing for a word test.

In practice, I integrate maybe 5% of these terms into my everyday speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” as well. But the majority of them stay like museum pieces – appreciated and listed but seldom used.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much keener. I find myself reaching less often for the same overused handful of adjectives, and more often for something precise and muscular. Few things are more gratifying than unearthing the exact term you were searching for – like finding the missing component that snaps the picture into position.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has given me back something I feared I’d forfeited – the joy of exercising a mind that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is at last stirring again.