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As a child, I consumed books until my vision blurred. When my GCSEs came around, I exercised the stamina of a monk, studying for lengthy periods without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that ability for intense concentration fade into endless scrolling on my device. My attention span now shrinks 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 profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to restore that cognitive flexibility, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a small promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an piece, or an casual conversation – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing fancy, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, ironically, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few minutes reading the collection back in an attempt to imprint the word into my memory.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny ritual has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about showing off with uncommon adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I look up and record a term, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very act of noticing, documenting and reviewing it interrupts the slide into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

Additionally, there's a journalling element 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.

Not that it’s an easy routine to maintain. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my device and enter “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the person pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening speed. (The Kindle, with its integrated lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often forget to do), dutifully browsing through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I incorporate maybe 5% of these words into my daily speech. “unreformable” made the cut. “mournful” too. But the majority of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my thinking much keener. I find myself turning less frequently for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something precise and strong. Rarely are more gratifying than unearthing the exact term you were searching for – like finding the lost puzzle piece that locks the picture into place.

At a time when our gadgets siphon off our attention with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for slow thought. And it has given me back something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after years of slack scrolling, is at last stirring again.