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As a youngster, I devoured novels until my eyes blurred. When my GCSEs came around, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, revising for hours without a break. But in lately, I’ve observed that ability for deep focus fade into endless browsing on my phone. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the tap of a finger. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for a person who creates content for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

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

The record now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I search for and note a term, I feel a faint expansion, as though some neglected part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never use “phantom” in conversation, the very process of spotting, documenting and revising it breaks the slide into passive, superficial attention.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it functions as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an simple routine to maintain. It is often very inconvenient. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, take out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often forget to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate maybe 5% of these words into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them remain like exhibits – admired and catalogued but rarely used.

Nevertheless, it’s made my mind much sharper. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same overused selection of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the perfect term you were searching for – like locating the lost puzzle piece that snaps the image into place.

At a time when our gadgets drain our attention with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for deliberate thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d forfeited – the pleasure of exercising a intellect that, after years of slack browsing, is at last stirring again.