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As a youngster, I consumed novels until my eyes grew hazy. When my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that ability for deep concentration dissolve into endless browsing on my device. My attention span now shrinks like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Reading for enjoyment seems less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for a person who creates content for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a term I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an piece, or an casual discussion – I would research it and write it down. Not a thing fancy, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reviewing the list back in an attempt to lodge the word into my memory.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, and this small ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very process of spotting, logging and revising it breaks the drift into passive, superficial focus.

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

It's not as if it’s an simple routine to keep up. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my phone and enter “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the person pressed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often neglect to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate perhaps five percent of these words into my daily conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” too. But most of them remain like exhibits – admired and catalogued but rarely handled.

Still, it’s made my mind much keener. I find myself turning less often for the same overused selection of descriptors, and more frequently for something precise and strong. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the exact word you were searching for – like finding the lost puzzle piece that locks the image into place.

In an era when our devices siphon off our attention with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is finally stirring again.