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When I was a youngster, I devoured books until my vision blurred. When my exams came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, studying for lengthy periods without a break. But in lately, I’ve watched that ability for deep concentration dissolve into infinite browsing on my device. My attention span now shrinks like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the brain rot.

So, about a year ago, I made a small vow: every time I came across 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 leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few moments reading the collection back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny habit has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with uncommon descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I look up and record a term, I feel a slight stretch, as though some underused part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, logging and revising it interrupts the drift into passive, superficial focus.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping element to it – it acts as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an simple routine to keep up. It is often very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, take out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the person squeezed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening speed. (The Kindle, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a word test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps 5% of these terms into my daily speech. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them stay like museum pieces – admired and listed but rarely used.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much keener. I find myself turning less frequently for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more often for something precise and strong. Rarely are more satisfying than unearthing the exact term you were searching for – like finding the lost puzzle piece that snaps the image into position.

At a time when our gadgets drain our focus with merciless efficiency, it feels subversive to use my own as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after years of lazy scrolling, is finally waking up again.