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As a child, I devoured novels until my vision grew hazy. Once my exams arrived, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for intense focus fade into infinite scrolling on my device. My focus now contracts like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for someone who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to restore that cognitive flexibility, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a small vow: every time I came across a term I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, ironically, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few minutes reviewing the collection back in an attempt to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny ritual has been quietly life-changing. The payoff is less about showing off with uncommon descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I look up and record a word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of spotting, logging and revising it interrupts the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

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

Not that it’s an simple habit to keep up. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to stop mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and enter “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can slow my pace to a frustrating speed. (The Kindle, with its integrated dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a word test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps 5% of these words into my daily conversation. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “mournful” too. But the majority of them stay like museum pieces – appreciated and listed but rarely used.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I find myself turning less often for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more often for something exact and strong. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect term you were searching for – like locating the lost component that snaps the picture into position.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our attention with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the joy of engaging a mind that, after a long time of slack browsing, is at last stirring again.