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When I was a youngster, I devoured novels until my vision grew hazy. When my exams came around, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for deep concentration dissolve into infinite scrolling on my device. My focus now contracts like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Reading for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to restore that cognitive flexibility, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t know – whether in a book, an article, or an casual conversation – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reading the collection back in an attempt to lodge the word into my memory.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been quietly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with uncommon adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound 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 underused part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, documenting and reviewing it interrupts the drift into passive, superficial attention.

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

Not that it’s an simple routine to keep up. It is often extremely inconvenient. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, take out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my pace to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often neglect to do), conscientiously scrolling through my expanding word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate perhaps five percent of these terms into my daily speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But the majority of them remain like museum pieces – admired and listed but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less frequently for the same tired handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and strong. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the perfect term you were seeking – like locating the lost puzzle piece that snaps the image into place.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our focus with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the joy of exercising a intellect that, after years of lazy browsing, is finally stirring again.