🔗 Share this article

When I was a child, I devoured novels until my vision grew hazy. When my GCSEs came around, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in lately, I’ve observed that capacity for deep concentration dissolve into infinite browsing on my device. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the touch of a finger. Reading for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to stop the brain rot.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t know – whether in a book, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would research it and record it. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reviewing the collection back in an attempt to imprint the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with uncommon descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics 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 use “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of spotting, documenting and reviewing it interrupts the slide into passive, superficial focus.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping 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 hearing.

It's not as if it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is often very impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, take out my phone and enter “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often forget to do), dutifully browsing through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a word test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these terms into my everyday speech. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and listed but seldom handled.

Still, it’s made my thinking much keener. I find myself turning less often for the same tired handful of descriptors, and more often for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the exact term you were searching for – like finding the missing component that locks the image into place.

In an era when our devices drain our attention with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for deliberate thought. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a intellect that, after years of lazy browsing, is at last waking up again.