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As a child, I devoured novels until my eyes grew hazy. When my GCSEs came around, I exercised the endurance of a monk, revising for lengthy periods without pause. But in lately, I’ve watched that capacity for deep focus fade into infinite browsing on my device. My focus now contracts like a slug at the tap of a finger. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like sustenance 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 aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a small vow: every time I came across a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an piece, or an casual conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reading the list back in an attempt to imprint the word into my memory.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny habit has been quietly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and record a term, I feel a faint expansion, as though some neglected part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never use “phantom” in conversation, the very process of spotting, documenting and reviewing it interrupts the slide into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

There is also a diary-keeping element to it – it acts as something of a diary, 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 habit to keep up. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, 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 pace to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps 5% of these terms into my everyday conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” as well. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and listed but rarely used.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much keener. I notice I'm reaching less often for the same overused selection of adjectives, and more often for something precise and muscular. Few things are more gratifying than discovering the perfect term you were searching for – like locating the lost component that snaps the picture into place.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our focus with relentless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use mine as a tool for slow thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after years of lazy scrolling, is at last stirring again.