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When I was a youngster, I consumed novels until my eyes grew hazy. Once my exams arrived, I exercised the stamina of a monk, revising for lengthy periods without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for intense concentration dissolve into endless scrolling on my device. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the tap of a finger. Reading for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who creates content for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to regain that mental elasticity, 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 understand – whether in a book, an piece, or an casual discussion – I would research it and record it. Not a thing fancy, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, ironically, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few moments reviewing the collection back in an attempt to imprint the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, and this small habit has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with uncommon descriptors – which, let’s face it, 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 neglected part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, logging and reviewing it breaks the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

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

It's not as if it’s an simple routine to maintain. It is often extremely inconvenient. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often forget to do), dutifully browsing through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps 5% of these words into my daily conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” as well. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much keener. I find myself turning less frequently for the same overused selection of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and strong. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the exact term you were searching for – like locating the lost component that locks the image into place.

In an era when our devices siphon off our focus with merciless efficiency, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the joy of exercising a intellect that, after years of lazy browsing, is finally stirring again.