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When I was a child, I devoured novels until my vision grew hazy. When my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without a break. But in lately, I’ve watched that ability for intense concentration fade into infinite browsing on my device. My focus now contracts like a slug at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for enjoyment feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to restore that cognitive flexibility, to stop the brain rot.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an article, or an overheard conversation – I would research it and record it. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few moments reviewing the list back in an effort to lodge the word into my recall.

The list now covers almost 20 pages, and this small habit has been quietly life-changing. The payoff is less about peacocking with obscure descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I look up and record a term, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in conversation, the very act of noticing, logging and revising it breaks the drift into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

There is also a journalling element to it – it acts as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an easy habit to maintain. It is often extremely impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and type “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my pace to a frustrating speed. (The Kindle, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often neglect to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m studying for a word test.

Realistically, I incorporate maybe five percent of these terms into my everyday conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them stay like exhibits – appreciated and listed but rarely used.

Still, it’s made my thinking much keener. I find myself reaching less frequently for the same overused selection of adjectives, and more often for something exact and muscular. Few things are more gratifying than unearthing the perfect term you were seeking – like locating the missing component that snaps the picture into place.

In an era when our devices siphon off our focus with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use my own as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has given me back something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after a long time of lazy browsing, is at last waking up again.