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As a child, I consumed books until my vision grew hazy. When my exams arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, studying for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for deep focus fade into infinite browsing on my device. My attention span now contracts like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Reading for pleasure feels 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 aimed to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a small promise: every time I encountered a term I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would research it and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reviewing the collection back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been subtly transformative. The payoff is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I search for and record a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some underused part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never use “phantom” in conversation, the very act of noticing, logging and revising it interrupts the drift into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

There is also a journalling aspect to it – it acts as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an easy habit to maintain. It is often extremely inconvenient. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my device and enter “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person pressed against me. It can reduce my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The Kindle, with its integrated dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently forget to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a word test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps 5% of these terms into my daily conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “mournful” as well. But the majority of them remain like exhibits – appreciated and catalogued but seldom used.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my thinking much keener. I find myself turning less often for the same overused selection of descriptors, and more often for something precise and strong. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the exact word you were searching for – like locating the lost component that locks the image into place.

In an era when our devices siphon off our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use mine as a instrument for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after years of slack browsing, is finally waking up again.