🔗 Share this article

As a child, I devoured novels until my vision grew hazy. When my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for intense focus fade into endless browsing on my device. My focus now contracts like a slug at the touch of a finger. Reading for enjoyment feels less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for someone who creates content for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to restore that cognitive flexibility, to stop the brain rot.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a modest vow: every time I came across a term I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an article, or an casual conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few minutes reviewing the list back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I search for and record a term, I feel a slight stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very act of noticing, logging and reviewing it interrupts the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed attention.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping element to it – it functions as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an easy habit to maintain. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to stop in the middle, pull out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening crawl. (The Kindle, with its integrated dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often neglect to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these terms into my everyday speech. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them stay like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my mind much keener. I find myself reaching less frequently for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more often for something exact and strong. Few things are more gratifying than discovering the exact word you were seeking – like locating the missing component that locks the image into position.

At a time when our gadgets drain our focus with relentless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use mine as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has given me back something I worried I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after a long time of slack scrolling, is finally stirring again.