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As a youngster, I devoured novels until my eyes blurred. When my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, revising for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for intense concentration dissolve into infinite scrolling on my phone. My focus now contracts like a snail at the touch of a thumb. Engaging with books for enjoyment feels less like sustenance 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 wanted to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an article, or an casual discussion – I would research it and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a running list maintained, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reviewing the list back in an attempt to lodge the word into my memory.

The record now spans almost twenty sheets, and this small habit has been subtly transformative. The payoff is less about showing off with uncommon adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I look up and record a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very process of noticing, logging and revising it interrupts the slide into passive, superficial attention.

There is also a journalling aspect to it – it acts as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an easy routine to maintain. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to stop in the middle, pull out my phone 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 speed. (The Kindle, with its built-in dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate maybe 5% of these terms into my daily conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them stay like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but seldom used.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much keener. I notice I'm turning less often for the same overused selection of adjectives, and more often for something precise and strong. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect word you were seeking – like finding the missing component that snaps the image into position.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our focus with relentless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use mine as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has given me back something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after a long time of slack browsing, is at last waking up again.