🔗 Share this article

When I was a youngster, I consumed novels until my vision blurred. Once my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for intense focus fade into endless browsing on my phone. My focus now contracts like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an piece, or an overheard discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a running list maintained, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few minutes reviewing the collection back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this small habit has been subtly life-changing. The payoff 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 practice. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in conversation, the very process of spotting, logging and revising it breaks the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed focus.

There is also a journalling aspect to it – it functions as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an easy routine to keep up. It is often extremely inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, take out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these terms into my daily speech. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them stay like exhibits – admired and catalogued but rarely used.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much sharper. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more often for something precise and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than unearthing the exact term you were seeking – like locating the lost puzzle piece that snaps the image into position.

At a time when our gadgets drain our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d forfeited – the joy of engaging a intellect that, after a long time of slack scrolling, is finally waking up again.