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As a child, I devoured books until my eyes grew hazy. When my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, studying for hours without pause. But in lately, I’ve observed that ability for deep focus dissolve into endless browsing on my phone. My focus now contracts like a snail at the touch of a finger. Reading for pleasure feels less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for a person who creates content for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t know – whether in a book, an article, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing fancy, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reading the collection back in an effort to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about showing off with uncommon descriptors – 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 record a term, I feel a slight expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of spotting, logging and reviewing it breaks the slide into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

There is also a diary-keeping element to it – it acts as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an simple routine to maintain. It is often very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my pace to a frustrating speed. (The Kindle, with its integrated dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully browsing through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe 5% of these terms into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” as well. But the majority of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but rarely handled.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my mind much sharper. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same tired handful of descriptors, and more often for something precise and strong. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect term you were seeking – like locating the lost component that snaps the picture into position.

At a time when our gadgets siphon off our attention with merciless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use mine as a instrument for deliberate thinking. And it has given me back something I worried I’d lost – the joy of exercising a mind that, after years of slack browsing, is at last waking up again.