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When I was a child, I consumed novels until my vision grew hazy. Once my exams came around, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without pause. 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 snail at the tap of a finger. Reading for pleasure seems less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for a person who creates content for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that cognitive flexibility, to halt the brain rot.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an piece, or an casual discussion – I would research it and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reading the list back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been quietly life-changing. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of spotting, documenting and reviewing it interrupts the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed focus.

There is also a diary-keeping aspect to it – it functions as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been reading, 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 very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to stop mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often forget to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate perhaps 5% of these words into my daily speech. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them remain like exhibits – appreciated and listed but seldom handled.

Still, it’s made my mind much keener. I notice I'm reaching less frequently for the same tired selection of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the exact word you were seeking – like finding the lost component that snaps the image into position.

In an era when our devices siphon off our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use my own as a instrument for slow thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the joy of engaging a intellect that, after years of slack browsing, is finally stirring again.