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As a youngster, I consumed novels until my eyes blurred. When my exams arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, revising for hours without a break. But in lately, I’ve observed that ability for deep concentration dissolve into infinite scrolling on my device. My focus now contracts like a snail at the touch of a thumb. Reading for pleasure feels less like sustenance 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 regain that cognitive flexibility, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an article, or an casual discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, amusingly, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few minutes reading the list back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I look up and record a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very process of noticing, documenting and reviewing it interrupts the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

There is also a diary-keeping element to it – it acts as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is often extremely inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to stop in the middle, pull out my device and enter “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the person squeezed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening speed. (The Kindle, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a word test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps 5% of these terms into my daily conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “mournful” as well. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but rarely handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my mind much keener. I find myself reaching less frequently for the same overused handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect term you were searching for – like finding the missing component that locks the image into position.

At a time when our devices drain our attention with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the joy of exercising a intellect that, after years of lazy scrolling, is finally stirring again.