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As a child, I consumed novels until my eyes grew hazy. When my exams came around, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without pause. But in lately, I’ve observed that ability for intense focus fade into endless browsing on my device. My focus now contracts like a snail at the tap of a finger. Reading for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for someone who creates content for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that cognitive flexibility, to stop the brain rot.

So, about a year ago, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t know – whether in a book, an article, or an casual conversation – I would research it and record it. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a running list kept, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reading the collection back in an effort to lodge the word into my memory.

The record now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been quietly life-changing. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and note a term, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, documenting and revising it interrupts the slide into passive, superficial attention.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping element to it – it acts as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to stop in the middle, take out my device and type “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these words into my daily speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them stay like exhibits – appreciated and catalogued but rarely used.

Still, it’s made my mind much keener. I notice I'm reaching less frequently for the same tired selection of descriptors, and more often for something exact and muscular. Few things are more gratifying than unearthing the perfect term you were searching for – like finding the missing puzzle piece that snaps the image into position.

In an era when our devices siphon off our focus with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for slow thought. And it has given me back something I worried I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after years of lazy scrolling, is at last stirring again.