🔗 Share this article

As a youngster, I consumed novels until my vision blurred. When my exams came around, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, studying for hours without a break. But in lately, I’ve observed that capacity for intense focus dissolve into infinite scrolling on my phone. My attention span now shrinks like a slug at the tap of a finger. Engaging with books for enjoyment feels less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for someone who writes for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to stop the brain rot.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t know – whether in a book, an piece, or an overheard discussion – I would research it and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, 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 list now covers almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very act of noticing, documenting and reviewing it interrupts the slide into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it functions as something of a diary, a log 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 routine to maintain. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, take out my phone and type “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my expanding word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps 5% of these terms into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “mournful” as well. But most of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and listed but seldom handled.

Still, it’s made my thinking much keener. I find myself turning less often for the same overused selection of adjectives, and more often for something exact and muscular. Few things are more gratifying than unearthing the exact term you were searching for – like finding the lost component that snaps the image into place.

In an era when our devices siphon off our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for slow thought. And it has given me back something I feared I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after years of lazy browsing, is finally waking up again.