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As a child, I consumed novels until my vision grew hazy. When my exams came around, I exercised the endurance of a monk, studying for lengthy periods without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for intense concentration fade into endless scrolling on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the touch of a thumb. Reading for enjoyment seems less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to stop the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an casual conversation – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, ironically, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reviewing the collection back in an effort to imprint the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I search for and note a term, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in dialogue, the very process of noticing, logging and reviewing it interrupts the drift into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it functions as something of a journal, a log 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 impractical. 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 pace to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I often neglect to do), dutifully scrolling through my expanding word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these words into my everyday conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them remain like exhibits – appreciated and catalogued but seldom used.

Still, it’s made my thinking much keener. I notice I'm turning less often for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Few things are more gratifying than discovering the exact word you were searching for – like finding the missing puzzle piece that locks the picture into position.

At a time when our gadgets drain our attention with merciless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use mine as a instrument for deliberate thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after a long time of slack browsing, is at last waking up again.