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When I was a youngster, I consumed books until my eyes blurred. Once my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the endurance of a monk, studying for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for deep focus dissolve into infinite browsing on my phone. My attention span now shrinks like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Reading for enjoyment feels less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to stop the mental decline.

Therefore, 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 casual conversation – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reviewing the collection back in an attempt to lodge the word into my recall.

The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been subtly transformative. The payoff is less about showing off with obscure descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I search for and record a word, I feel a slight stretch, as though some neglected part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very process of noticing, logging and revising it breaks the slide into inactive, superficial attention.

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

Not that it’s an easy routine to keep up. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and enter “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often neglect to do), conscientiously scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps 5% of these terms into my daily conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them stay like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but seldom handled.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less often for the same tired handful of descriptors, and more often for something precise and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the perfect term you were searching for – like finding the lost component that snaps the picture into position.

At a time when our devices drain our focus with merciless efficiency, it feels subversive to use my own as a tool for slow thought. And it has given me back something I worried I’d forfeited – the joy of exercising a intellect that, after years of slack scrolling, is finally stirring again.