🔗 Share this article

As a child, I consumed books until my eyes blurred. When my exams arrived, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, studying for lengthy periods without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for intense focus dissolve into infinite browsing on my phone. My attention span now shrinks like a snail at the tap of a finger. Reading for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for someone who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the brain rot.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a book, an piece, or an casual discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few moments reading the list back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The record now covers almost 20 pages, and this small habit has been quietly life-changing. The payoff is less about peacocking with uncommon adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I search for and record a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in conversation, the very process of noticing, logging and reviewing it breaks the drift into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

There is also a journalling aspect to it – it acts as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my phone and type “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the stranger squeezed against me. It can reduce my pace to a frustrating crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a word test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these words into my everyday conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” too. But the majority of them remain like exhibits – admired and listed but rarely handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my mind much sharper. I notice I'm turning less often for the same overused selection of descriptors, and more often for something precise and strong. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect term you were seeking – like locating the lost puzzle piece that snaps the image into place.

At a time when our gadgets drain our attention with merciless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use mine as a instrument for deliberate 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.