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When I was a youngster, I consumed books until my eyes blurred. When my exams arrived, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, studying for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that ability for intense concentration dissolve into infinite browsing on my device. My attention span now contracts like a slug at the touch of a finger. Reading for pleasure seems less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for someone who writes for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that cognitive flexibility, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an piece, or an casual conversation – I would research it and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, ironically, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few minutes reading the collection back in an attempt to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

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, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, documenting and reviewing it breaks the drift into inactive, superficial attention.

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

It's not as if it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, take out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person pressed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a word test.

Realistically, I incorporate maybe 5% of these terms into my daily speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them remain like exhibits – appreciated and catalogued but rarely handled.

Still, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I notice I'm turning less often for the same overused selection of descriptors, and more frequently for something precise and strong. Few things are more gratifying than discovering the perfect term you were searching for – like finding the missing component that locks the image into place.

In an era when our gadgets drain our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is at last waking up again.