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As a youngster, I devoured novels until my eyes blurred. When my exams came around, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for intense concentration dissolve into infinite browsing on my device. My attention span now contracts like a slug at the touch of a finger. Reading for pleasure feels less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to restore that cognitive flexibility, to halt the brain rot.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a book, an article, or an casual discussion – I would research it and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record kept, ironically, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few moments reading the list back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been subtly transformative. The payoff is less about showing off with uncommon adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I look up and record a word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very process of spotting, logging and revising it interrupts the drift into inactive, superficial 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 listening to.

Not that it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m engaged 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 elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my pace to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often forget to do), conscientiously scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a word test.

Realistically, I integrate maybe five percent of these terms into my daily conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “mournful” too. But most of them stay like exhibits – appreciated and catalogued but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something precise and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than unearthing the exact word you were seeking – like finding the lost puzzle piece that locks the image into place.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our attention with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d forfeited – the joy of exercising a mind that, after a long time of slack browsing, is at last waking up again.