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When I was a child, I consumed books until my eyes blurred. When my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, studying for hours without a break. But in lately, I’ve watched that capacity for deep concentration dissolve into infinite browsing on my device. My focus now contracts like a snail at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for a person who creates content for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the brain rot.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I encountered a term 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 leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d devote a few minutes reading the list back in an attempt to lodge the word into my recall.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been subtly transformative. The payoff 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 ritual. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in conversation, the very act of spotting, documenting and reviewing it breaks the slide into passive, superficial attention.

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

Not that it’s an simple routine to keep up. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my device and enter “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often forget to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a word test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps 5% of these words into my daily conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “mournful” too. But the majority of them stay like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but rarely used.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much sharper. I find myself reaching less often for the same tired selection of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and strong. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the perfect term you were seeking – like locating the lost puzzle piece that locks the picture into place.

In an era when our devices siphon off our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is finally waking up again.