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As a youngster, I devoured books until my vision blurred. When my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for intense concentration dissolve into endless browsing on my phone. My attention span now shrinks like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for a person who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to regain that mental elasticity, to stop the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t know – whether in a book, an article, or an overheard conversation – I would research it and write it down. Nothing fancy, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few minutes reading the list back in an effort to lodge the word into my recall.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been subtly transformative. The payoff is less about peacocking with uncommon adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I search for and record a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very act of noticing, documenting and reviewing it interrupts the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

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

It's not as if it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the person pressed against me. It can reduce my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often forget to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a word test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these words into my everyday speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” as well. But the majority of them stay like exhibits – appreciated and listed but rarely used.

Still, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I find myself turning less often for the same overused handful of adjectives, and more often for something precise and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than unearthing the exact term you were searching for – like locating the missing component that snaps the image into place.

At a time when our devices siphon off our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for slow thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the joy of exercising a mind that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is at last waking up again.