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When I was a youngster, I consumed novels until my vision grew hazy. When my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, studying for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve observed that ability for intense focus dissolve into infinite scrolling on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the touch of a finger. Reading for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who writes for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t know – whether in a book, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would research it and record it. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reading the list back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this small habit has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a slight stretch, as though some neglected part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very act of noticing, logging and revising it breaks the slide into inactive, superficial attention.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it acts 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 very inconvenient. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can reduce my pace to a frustrating speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a word test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these words into my daily conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them stay like museum pieces – admired and listed but rarely handled.

Still, it’s rendered my thinking much keener. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and strong. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the perfect word you were searching for – like locating the lost component that snaps the picture into place.

At a time when our devices siphon off our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a tool for slow thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after a long time of lazy browsing, is at last stirring again.