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When I was a child, I consumed novels until my eyes blurred. Once my exams arrived, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, studying for hours without pause. But in lately, I’ve watched that capacity for intense focus dissolve into endless scrolling on my phone. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Reading for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who writes for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would research it and write it down. Not a thing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a running list kept, ironically, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reviewing the list back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The record now spans almost twenty sheets, and this tiny ritual has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about peacocking with obscure descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I look up and note a term, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very act of noticing, documenting and revising it interrupts the drift into passive, superficial focus.

There is also a journalling 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 listening to.

Not that it’s an easy habit to maintain. It is often extremely inconvenient. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the stranger pressed against me. It can reduce my pace to a frustrating crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps 5% of these words into my everyday speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” too. But the majority of them stay like exhibits – appreciated and catalogued but seldom handled.

Still, it’s made my thinking much keener. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same tired selection of descriptors, and more often for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than unearthing the exact word you were seeking – like finding the missing component that locks the image into position.

At a time when our devices drain our attention with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for slow thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d forfeited – the joy of exercising a mind that, after years of slack browsing, is finally stirring again.