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When I was a youngster, I consumed books until my eyes grew hazy. Once my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, studying for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for deep concentration fade into infinite scrolling on my phone. My focus now contracts like a snail at the touch of a thumb. Reading for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for a person who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to regain that cognitive flexibility, to halt the brain rot.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I encountered a term I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an article, or an casual conversation – I would research it and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few moments reviewing the collection back in an attempt to imprint the word into my memory.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny ritual has been subtly life-changing. The benefit is less about showing off with uncommon adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some neglected part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in conversation, the very process of noticing, documenting and revising it interrupts the slide into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

There is also a diary-keeping element to it – it acts as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an simple routine to maintain. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to stop in the middle, take out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the stranger squeezed against me. It can reduce my pace to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), conscientiously scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps 5% of these words into my daily speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” too. But most of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but seldom used.

Nevertheless, it’s made my mind much keener. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something precise and strong. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the perfect term you were seeking – like locating the missing component that snaps the image into position.

At a time when our devices siphon off our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the joy of exercising a mind that, after years of slack scrolling, is finally stirring again.