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When I was a child, I consumed novels until my vision grew hazy. Once my exams arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without pause. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for deep focus fade into infinite scrolling on my phone. My attention span now shrinks like a snail at the tap of a finger. Reading for enjoyment seems less like nourishment 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 aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.

So, about a year ago, I made a small promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a book, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would research it and write it down. Not a thing fancy, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few moments reading the list back in an attempt to lodge the word into my memory.

The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in conversation, the very act of noticing, logging and reviewing it interrupts the slide into inactive, semi-skimmed attention.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping aspect to it – it functions as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an easy routine to keep up. It is often extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause mid-paragraph, take out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe 5% of these words into my daily speech. “unreformable” was adopted. “mournful” too. But most of them stay like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but rarely handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my mind much sharper. I find myself turning less frequently for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more often for something exact and muscular. Few things are more gratifying than discovering the exact word you were seeking – like finding the missing component that locks the picture into position.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our focus with merciless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use mine as a tool for slow thought. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is at last stirring again.