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As a youngster, I consumed books until my vision blurred. When my exams arrived, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, studying for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve observed that ability for intense concentration dissolve into endless browsing on my phone. My attention span now contracts like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Reading for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for a person who writes for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to restore that cognitive flexibility, 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 understand – whether in a novel, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a running list maintained, amusingly, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few moments reading the collection back in an attempt to lodge the word into my memory.

The record now covers almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with uncommon descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and record a word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some underused part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in dialogue, the very process of noticing, logging and revising it interrupts the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

There is also a diary-keeping aspect to it – it functions as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is often very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my phone and type “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the person pressed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its integrated dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently forget to do), conscientiously browsing through my growing word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate perhaps five percent of these terms into my daily conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my thinking much sharper. I find myself turning less often for the same tired selection of adjectives, and more often for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect term you were searching for – like finding the lost puzzle piece that snaps the image into position.

At a time when our gadgets drain our attention with merciless efficiency, it feels subversive to use my own 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 lazy scrolling, is finally waking up again.