🔗 Share this article

As a child, I devoured books until my vision blurred. When my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, revising for hours without a break. But in lately, I’ve watched that capacity for deep concentration fade into infinite browsing on my phone. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the touch of a thumb. Reading for pleasure seems less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for a person who creates content for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to restore that cognitive flexibility, to stop the brain rot.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing fancy, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d devote a few minutes reviewing the collection back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny ritual has been subtly transformative. The payoff is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some underused part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in conversation, the very act of noticing, documenting and revising it interrupts the drift into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

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

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

In practice, I integrate perhaps five percent of these terms into my daily speech. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them stay like exhibits – admired and listed but rarely used.

Still, it’s made my mind much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less frequently for the same overused handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and muscular. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the perfect word you were searching for – like finding the missing component that locks the image into place.

In an era when our gadgets drain our attention with merciless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use mine as a instrument for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after a long time of lazy browsing, is finally stirring again.