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As a youngster, I consumed books until my eyes grew hazy. Once my GCSEs came around, I exercised the stamina of a monk, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in lately, I’ve observed that ability for intense focus dissolve into infinite scrolling on my phone. My attention span now shrinks like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Engaging with books for enjoyment feels less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for someone who writes for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I encountered a term I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few minutes reviewing the list back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now covers almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been quietly life-changing. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I look up and record a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, logging and reviewing it interrupts the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

There is also a diary-keeping aspect to it – it functions as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an easy routine to maintain. It is often very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my device and type “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously scrolling through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps 5% of these words into my everyday conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them stay like exhibits – appreciated and catalogued but rarely handled.

Still, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I find myself turning less often for the same overused handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and muscular. Few things are more gratifying than discovering the exact word you were searching for – like locating the missing component that snaps the picture into position.

At a time when our devices drain our focus with merciless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after a long time of slack scrolling, is at last stirring again.