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As a child, I devoured novels until my vision blurred. Once my exams arrived, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, revising for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for intense focus fade into endless browsing on my device. My attention span now shrinks like a snail at the tap of a finger. Reading for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for someone who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a small promise: every time I came across a term I didn’t know – whether in a book, an piece, or an overheard discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record kept, ironically, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reviewing the list back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now covers almost 20 pages, and this small habit has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about showing off with uncommon adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and note a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some underused part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in conversation, the very act of noticing, logging and reviewing it interrupts the slide into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

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

Not that it’s an simple habit to keep up. It is often very inconvenient. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, take out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the person pressed against me. It can reduce my reading to a frustrating speed. (The Kindle, with its built-in dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often neglect to do), conscientiously scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a word test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe five percent of these terms into my daily conversation. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “mournful” as well. But the majority of them stay like museum pieces – admired and listed but seldom used.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less frequently for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and muscular. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the exact term you were seeking – like finding the missing puzzle piece that locks the image into position.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our attention with relentless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use mine as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has given me back something I feared I’d forfeited – the joy of exercising a intellect that, after a long time of lazy browsing, is finally waking up again.