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When I was a child, I devoured novels until my eyes blurred. When my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the stamina of a monk, studying for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for intense concentration fade into endless scrolling on my phone. My focus now contracts like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Reading for pleasure feels 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 wanted to restore that cognitive flexibility, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a term I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few minutes reviewing the collection back in an effort to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been quietly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very process of spotting, documenting and revising it breaks the slide into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

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

Not that it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is often extremely inconvenient. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my phone and enter “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person pressed against me. It can reduce my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my expanding word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate maybe 5% of these terms into my everyday speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But the majority of them stay like museum pieces – admired and listed but rarely handled.

Still, it’s rendered my thinking much sharper. I notice I'm turning less often for the same tired selection of descriptors, and more often for something exact and strong. Few things are more gratifying than unearthing the exact word you were searching for – like locating the missing component that locks the picture into place.

At a time when our gadgets siphon off our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use mine as a instrument for slow thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d forfeited – the pleasure of exercising a intellect that, after years of lazy scrolling, is at last stirring again.