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As a child, I consumed books until my eyes blurred. Once my exams arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a monk, studying for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for intense concentration fade into infinite scrolling on my device. My focus now contracts like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Reading for pleasure feels 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 made me sad. I aimed to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small vow: every time I came across a term I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would look it up and record it. Nothing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reading the list back in an attempt to lodge the word into my recall.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny habit has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with uncommon adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. 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, logging and reviewing it breaks the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

There is also a diary-keeping 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 hearing.

Not that it’s an easy routine to maintain. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to stop mid-paragraph, pull out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the stranger squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I often neglect to do), dutifully browsing through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a word test.

Realistically, I incorporate maybe 5% of these terms into my daily conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but seldom used.

Still, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I find myself turning less often for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more often for something exact and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the perfect word you were seeking – like locating the missing puzzle piece that snaps the image into position.

In an era when our devices drain our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use mine as a tool for deliberate thought. 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 at last stirring again.