🔗 Share this article

As a child, I consumed novels until my vision grew hazy. When my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, revising for hours without a break. But in lately, I’ve watched that capacity for intense focus fade into endless browsing on my phone. My focus now contracts like a snail at the tap 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 made me sad. I wanted to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an article, or an casual conversation – I would research it and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few minutes reviewing the list back in an attempt to imprint the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I look up and record a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some neglected part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very process of noticing, documenting and revising it interrupts the drift into passive, superficial focus.

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

It's not as if it’s an easy habit to maintain. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, take out my device and enter “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a word test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe 5% of these words into my everyday speech. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “mournful” as well. But most of them stay like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my mind much sharper. I find myself reaching less frequently for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more often for something precise and muscular. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the perfect word you were seeking – like finding the lost puzzle piece that locks the image into position.

At a time when our devices drain our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use mine as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the joy of engaging a mind that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is at last waking up again.