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As a child, I devoured books until my vision blurred. Once my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, studying for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that ability for intense concentration fade into endless scrolling on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like sustenance 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 stop the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would research it and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reading the collection back in an attempt to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this small habit has been subtly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very act of spotting, documenting and reviewing it breaks the drift into passive, superficial attention.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping element to it – it acts as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is often extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to stop in the middle, take out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The Kindle, with its integrated dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently neglect to do), dutifully browsing through my growing word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps five percent of these terms into my daily conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” as well. But most of them stay like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but seldom used.

Still, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less frequently for the same tired selection of descriptors, and more frequently for something precise and strong. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect word you were seeking – like finding the missing component that locks the image into position.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our attention with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for slow thinking. And it has given me back something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after years of slack browsing, is at last stirring again.