🔗 Share this article

When I was a youngster, I devoured novels until my vision blurred. Once my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for intense focus fade into infinite browsing on my device. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the touch of a thumb. Reading for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who writes for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a modest vow: every time I came across a word I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an piece, or an casual conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook 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 effort to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The record now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been subtly life-changing. The payoff is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, logging and revising it breaks the slide into inactive, superficial focus.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it acts as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening speed. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate maybe five percent of these terms into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them stay like exhibits – admired and catalogued but rarely used.

Still, it’s made my mind much sharper. I find myself turning less often for the same overused selection of adjectives, and more often for something exact and strong. Rarely are more satisfying than unearthing the exact term you were searching for – like finding the missing puzzle piece that locks the image into place.

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