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As a child, I devoured novels until my vision grew hazy. When my GCSEs came around, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without a break. But in lately, I’ve watched that capacity for deep focus dissolve into infinite browsing on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Reading for enjoyment feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who creates content for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to regain that cognitive flexibility, to halt the brain rot.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an piece, or an casual discussion – I would research it and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, ironically, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few moments reviewing the list back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with uncommon descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some neglected part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in conversation, the very act of noticing, documenting and revising it breaks the slide into passive, superficial focus.

There is also a journalling element to it – it acts 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 easy routine to maintain. It is frequently extremely inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my device and enter “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the stranger squeezed against me. It can reduce my pace to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these words into my everyday conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them stay like exhibits – admired and listed but seldom handled.

Still, it’s made my thinking much keener. I find myself turning less often for the same tired selection of descriptors, and more frequently for something precise and strong. Few things are more gratifying than discovering the perfect term you were seeking – like finding the missing puzzle piece that locks the image into place.

In an era when our devices drain our focus with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the joy of exercising a intellect that, after years of slack browsing, is finally waking up again.