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As a youngster, I devoured books until my eyes blurred. Once my exams arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a monk, revising for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for deep focus dissolve into infinite browsing on my device. My focus now contracts like a snail at the tap of a finger. Reading for enjoyment feels less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for someone who creates content for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an casual discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few minutes reviewing the collection back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this small habit has been quietly life-changing. The benefit is less about showing off with uncommon adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never use “phantom” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, documenting and revising it breaks the slide into inactive, semi-skimmed focus.

There is also a diary-keeping aspect to it – it functions as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

It's not as if it’s an simple routine to keep up. It is frequently extremely inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the stranger pressed against me. It can reduce my reading to a frustrating speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently forget to do), conscientiously scrolling through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a word test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps 5% of these words into my daily speech. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them stay like exhibits – admired and catalogued but rarely handled.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my thinking much keener. I notice I'm reaching less frequently for the same overused selection of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and muscular. Few things are more gratifying than unearthing the perfect term you were seeking – like locating the lost component that locks the picture into place.

At a time when our devices siphon off our focus with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for slow thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the joy of exercising a mind that, after years of slack browsing, is finally stirring again.