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When I was a child, I devoured books until my eyes blurred. When my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, revising for hours without pause. But in lately, I’ve watched that ability for intense concentration fade into infinite browsing on my phone. My attention span now shrinks like a snail at the tap of a finger. Reading 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 aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to stop the mental decline.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a term I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an piece, or an overheard discussion – I would research it and record it. Not a thing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few moments reviewing the collection back in an effort to lodge the word into my memory.

The list now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been subtly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I search for and note a term, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very act of spotting, documenting and reviewing it interrupts the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

Additionally, there's 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 hearing.

It's not as if it’s an easy routine to keep up. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to stop mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and type “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the person pressed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps 5% 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 handled.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much keener. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the exact term you were searching for – like finding the missing puzzle piece that snaps the picture into place.

At a time when our gadgets siphon off our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use mine as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the joy of exercising a intellect that, after years of slack scrolling, is finally waking up again.