🔗 Share this article

As a youngster, I consumed novels until my vision blurred. Once my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that ability for deep focus fade into endless scrolling on my phone. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the touch of a thumb. Engaging with books for enjoyment feels less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for someone who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to regain that cognitive flexibility, to halt the brain rot.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t know – whether in a book, an article, or an casual conversation – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing fancy, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reviewing the collection back in an effort to imprint the word into my recall.

The record now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been subtly life-changing. The benefit is less about showing off 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 look up and record a word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “phantom” in conversation, the very process of noticing, documenting and reviewing it breaks the slide into inactive, semi-skimmed attention.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it acts 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 simple routine to maintain. It is often extremely inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my growing word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps five percent of these words into my daily speech. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them stay like exhibits – appreciated and catalogued but rarely used.

Still, it’s rendered my thinking much keener. I notice I'm reaching less frequently for the same tired selection of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the perfect term you were searching for – like locating the missing component that locks the picture into position.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the joy of exercising a mind that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is finally stirring again.