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As a child, I devoured novels until my eyes blurred. Once my exams arrived, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, revising for lengthy periods without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for deep focus dissolve into infinite scrolling on my device. My attention span 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 professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to regain that mental elasticity, to stop the brain rot.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small vow: 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 record it. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few minutes reading the list back in an effort to imprint the word into my memory.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this small habit has been quietly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I look up and note a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never use “phantom” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, documenting and revising it interrupts the slide into inactive, superficial focus.

There is also a journalling element to it – it functions as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the person squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating speed. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently forget to do), conscientiously scrolling through my expanding word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps five percent of these terms into my daily speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But the majority of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and listed but seldom used.

Still, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less often for the same tired selection of descriptors, and more often for something exact and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect term you were searching for – like locating the lost component that snaps the picture into place.

At a time when our devices drain our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a tool for slow thinking. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the joy of engaging a mind that, after years of slack scrolling, is at last stirring again.