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When I was a youngster, I consumed books until my vision blurred. Once my exams came around, I exercised the endurance of a monk, revising for lengthy periods without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for intense focus fade into endless browsing on my phone. My attention span now shrinks like a slug at the tap of a finger. 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 made me sad. I aimed to restore that cognitive flexibility, to stop the brain rot.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an article, or an casual discussion – I would look it up and record it. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reading the collection back in an effort to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now covers almost 20 pages, and this small habit has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in conversation, the very process of noticing, documenting and reviewing it breaks the drift into passive, superficial focus.

There is also a journalling element to it – it functions as something of a diary, a record 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 very impractical. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to stop in the middle, take out my phone and type “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its integrated dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe five percent of these words into my everyday speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” too. But the majority of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less often for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect term you were seeking – like locating the missing component that snaps the image into position.

At a time when our gadgets drain our focus with relentless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use my own as a instrument for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after years of slack browsing, is finally waking up again.