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As a youngster, I devoured books until my vision grew hazy. When my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, revising for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for intense focus dissolve into infinite browsing on my device. My focus now contracts like a snail at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.

So, about a year ago, I made a small promise: every time I came across a term I didn’t know – 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 stylish pen. Just a running list kept, ironically, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reading the collection back in an attempt to lodge the word into my memory.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with uncommon adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and record a word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never use “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, documenting and revising it breaks the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed focus.

There is also a diary-keeping aspect to it – it acts as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

It's not as if it’s an easy routine to keep up. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I often forget to do), conscientiously scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps 5% of these words into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them remain like exhibits – admired and catalogued but rarely used.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much sharper. I find myself reaching less frequently for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more often for something exact and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the exact word you were searching for – like finding the missing puzzle piece that snaps the picture into position.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our attention with merciless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use mine as a instrument for deliberate thinking. And it has given me back something I worried I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after a long time of lazy browsing, is finally stirring again.