🔗 Share this article

When I was a child, I devoured books until my eyes blurred. Once my GCSEs came around, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, studying for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for intense focus dissolve into infinite scrolling on my device. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Engaging with books for enjoyment feels less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for a person who creates content for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an piece, or an casual conversation – I would research it and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few moments reading the list back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure 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 slight expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very act of spotting, documenting and revising it breaks the drift into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

There is also a diary-keeping aspect to it – it acts as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is often very inconvenient. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my pace to a frustrating speed. (The e-reader, with its integrated dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate perhaps 5% of these words into my daily conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and listed but rarely handled.

Still, it’s rendered my thinking much keener. I find myself reaching less frequently for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more often for something exact and strong. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the perfect term you were seeking – like locating the lost component that snaps the image into place.

At a time when our gadgets drain our focus with relentless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use mine as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has given me back something I worried I’d forfeited – the joy of engaging a intellect that, after a long time of slack browsing, is at last stirring again.