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When I was a child, I consumed novels until my vision blurred. When my exams arrived, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without pause. But in lately, I’ve observed that capacity for deep focus fade into infinite scrolling on my device. My attention span now contracts like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for someone who writes for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a modest vow: every time I came across a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an piece, or an casual conversation – I would research it and write it down. Not a thing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reading the collection back in an attempt to lodge the word into my memory.

The list now spans almost twenty sheets, and this small habit has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics 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 flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of spotting, documenting and revising it interrupts the slide into inactive, superficial focus.

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

It's not as if it’s an easy routine to maintain. It is often very impractical. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the person pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe 5% of these words into my everyday speech. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and listed but seldom handled.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much keener. I find myself turning less frequently for the same overused selection of adjectives, and more frequently for something exact and strong. Few things are more gratifying than unearthing the perfect term you were searching for – like finding the lost puzzle piece that snaps the image into position.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use mine as a instrument for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the joy of engaging a intellect that, after a long time of slack browsing, is finally waking up again.