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When I was a youngster, I devoured novels until my eyes blurred. Once my exams came around, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, revising for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for deep focus fade into infinite browsing on my device. My attention span now shrinks like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Reading for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an casual conversation – I would research it and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few minutes reading the list back in an effort to imprint the word into my recall.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this small ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with uncommon adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I look up and note a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never use “phantom” in conversation, the very act of noticing, logging and revising it interrupts the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

There is also a journalling element to it – it acts as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an easy habit to maintain. It is often extremely inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a word test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps 5% of these words into my daily speech. “unreformable” was adopted. “mournful” too. But most of them stay like exhibits – admired and listed but rarely handled.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much sharper. I find myself turning less frequently for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and strong. Rarely are more gratifying than unearthing the exact word you were searching for – like finding the missing puzzle piece that locks the picture into place.

In an era when our devices drain our attention with relentless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use my own as a instrument for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after years of lazy browsing, is at last waking up again.