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As a child, I devoured books until my vision blurred. When my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in lately, I’ve observed that capacity for intense concentration fade into infinite scrolling on my device. My attention span now contracts like a slug at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d devote a few minutes reading the list back in an effort to lodge the word into my memory.

The record now spans almost twenty sheets, and this small habit has been quietly life-changing. The payoff is less about showing off with obscure descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a slight stretch, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, logging and reviewing it breaks the drift into passive, superficial attention.

Additionally, there's 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 listening to.

Not that it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to stop in the middle, pull out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a frustrating speed. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps five percent of these words into my daily speech. “unreformable” made the cut. “mournful” as well. But the majority of them remain like exhibits – appreciated and listed but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much keener. I notice I'm turning 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 exact term you were seeking – like finding the missing component that snaps the picture into place.

At a time when our gadgets siphon off our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after a long time of slack scrolling, is finally stirring again.