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When I was a youngster, I devoured books until my eyes blurred. When my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, revising for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for intense focus dissolve into endless scrolling on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a slug at the tap of a finger. Engaging with books for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for someone who creates content for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the brain rot.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest vow: every time I came across a word I didn’t know – whether in a book, an piece, or an overheard discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few minutes reading the collection back in an effort to lodge the word into my recall.

The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been subtly transformative. The payoff is less about showing off with obscure descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I look up and record a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in conversation, the very process of spotting, logging and reviewing it breaks the drift into inactive, superficial attention.

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

Not that it’s an easy habit to maintain. It is often extremely inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and enter “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the stranger squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening speed. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously scrolling through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these words into my daily conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” as well. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and listed but seldom used.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my thinking much keener. I notice I'm turning less often for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and muscular. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the perfect word you were searching for – like locating the missing puzzle piece that locks the image into position.

In an era when our gadgets drain our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after years of slack scrolling, is at last waking up again.