🔗 Share this article

When I was a youngster, I devoured novels until my vision blurred. When my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, revising for lengthy periods without pause. But in lately, I’ve watched that ability for intense concentration dissolve into infinite browsing on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Reading for enjoyment feels less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for someone who creates content for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to restore that cognitive flexibility, to halt the brain rot.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an piece, or an overheard discussion – I would research it and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reviewing the collection back in an effort to lodge the word into my recall.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I look up and record a term, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, documenting and reviewing it interrupts the drift into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it acts as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an easy routine to maintain. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to stop in the middle, pull out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my pace to a maddening speed. (The Kindle, with its integrated dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often forget to do), conscientiously scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a word test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these words into my daily conversation. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my mind much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less often for the same tired selection of adjectives, and more often for something precise and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the perfect word you were searching for – like finding the lost puzzle piece that snaps the picture into place.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our focus with relentless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use my own as a instrument for slow thought. And it has given me back something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after a long time of slack browsing, is at last stirring again.