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When I was a child, I devoured books until my eyes blurred. When my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the stamina of a monk, studying for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for intense focus fade into endless browsing on my phone. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the touch of a thumb. Reading for pleasure feels less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for someone who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to stop the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a modest vow: every time I came across a term I didn’t know – whether in a book, an piece, or an casual discussion – I would research it and write it down. Not a thing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few minutes reading the list back in an attempt to lodge the word into my memory.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been subtly transformative. The payoff is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – 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 note a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very act of noticing, documenting and revising it breaks the slide into inactive, superficial attention.

There is also a journalling aspect to it – it acts as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is often extremely inconvenient. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often neglect to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps 5% of these terms into my daily conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them stay like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less frequently for the same tired handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something precise and strong. Few things are more gratifying than discovering the exact term you were seeking – like locating the missing puzzle piece that snaps the image into place.

In an era when our devices siphon off our attention with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after a long time of slack browsing, is finally stirring again.