🔗 Share this article

When I was a youngster, I devoured novels until my eyes grew hazy. When my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the stamina of a monk, revising for lengthy periods without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for deep concentration dissolve into endless scrolling on my phone. My attention span now shrinks like a slug at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for enjoyment feels less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for someone who writes 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 brain rot.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an piece, or an casual discussion – I would research it and write it down. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d devote a few minutes reading the list back in an attempt to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been quietly life-changing. The payoff is less about showing off with uncommon descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a slight stretch, as though some neglected part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never use “phantom” in dialogue, the very process of noticing, logging and reviewing it interrupts the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

There is also a journalling element to it – it acts as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been engaging, 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 often very impractical. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person pressed against me. It can reduce my pace to a maddening speed. (The Kindle, with its integrated lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate maybe five percent of these terms into my daily conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “mournful” too. But the majority of them stay like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but rarely used.

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

In an era when our devices drain our attention with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the joy of exercising a mind that, after a long time of slack scrolling, is finally waking up again.