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As a child, I consumed novels until my eyes grew hazy. When my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, studying for lengthy periods without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for intense focus dissolve into endless browsing on my device. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Engaging with books for enjoyment feels less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the brain rot.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a small promise: every time I encountered a term I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an piece, or an casual conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reviewing the collection back in an attempt to lodge the word into my recall.

The record now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been quietly life-changing. The payoff is less about showing off with obscure descriptors – 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 word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some neglected part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very process of noticing, logging and reviewing it interrupts the drift into inactive, superficial attention.

There is also a journalling aspect to it – it functions as something of a diary, 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 keep up. It is often extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my device and type “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the stranger pressed against me. It can reduce my pace to a frustrating crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m studying for a word test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these words into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “mournful” too. But the majority of them stay like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but seldom used.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much keener. I notice I'm reaching less often for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the exact term you were searching for – like locating the missing component that locks the picture into position.

In an era when our gadgets drain our focus with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use my own as a tool for slow thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the joy of exercising a mind that, after years of lazy browsing, is at last waking up again.