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When I was a child, I consumed novels until my eyes grew hazy. When my exams arrived, I exercised the stamina of a monk, revising for lengthy periods without pause. But in lately, I’ve watched that capacity for deep focus dissolve into infinite scrolling on my phone. My focus now contracts like a slug at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for enjoyment feels less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to restore that mental elasticity, to stop the mental decline.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an article, or an casual conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few minutes reviewing the collection back in an attempt to imprint the word into my recall.

The list now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of spotting, documenting and revising it interrupts the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed focus.

There is also a diary-keeping 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 listening to.

It's not as if it’s an simple routine to keep up. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to stop in the middle, take out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the person pressed against me. It can reduce my pace to a maddening crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a word test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these terms into my everyday speech. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them stay like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my mind much keener. I find myself reaching less frequently for the same tired selection of descriptors, and more often for something exact and strong. Few things are more gratifying than discovering the perfect term you were searching for – like locating the lost puzzle piece that locks the image into place.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has given me back something I feared I’d forfeited – the pleasure of exercising a intellect that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is finally waking up again.