🔗 Share this article

As a child, I consumed novels until my vision grew hazy. Once my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, revising for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for deep focus dissolve into endless browsing on my phone. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the touch of a thumb. Engaging with books for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. 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.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few minutes reading the list back in an effort to lodge the word into my memory.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been subtly life-changing. The payoff is less about peacocking with uncommon adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and record a term, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never use “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, documenting and reviewing it breaks the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed attention.

There is also a diary-keeping aspect to it – it acts as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the person squeezed against me. It can slow my pace to a frustrating speed. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a word test.

Realistically, I integrate maybe five percent of these terms into my everyday conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them stay like exhibits – appreciated and listed but seldom handled.

Still, it’s rendered my thinking much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less frequently for the same tired selection of adjectives, and more frequently for something exact and strong. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the perfect term you were searching for – like finding the missing puzzle piece that locks the image into position.

In an era when our devices siphon off our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d forfeited – the joy of exercising a mind that, after a long time of lazy browsing, is finally waking up again.