🔗 Share this article

When I was a child, I consumed novels until my eyes blurred. When my GCSEs came around, I exercised the stamina of a monk, revising for hours without pause. But in lately, I’ve watched that capacity for deep focus fade into infinite browsing on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for enjoyment seems less like sustenance 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 regain that mental elasticity, to stop the brain rot.

So, about a year ago, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an piece, or an casual conversation – I would research it and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few minutes reading the collection back in an attempt to imprint the word into my recall.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this small habit has been subtly life-changing. The payoff is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I look up and record a word, I feel a slight stretch, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, documenting and revising it interrupts the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

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

It's not as if it’s an easy routine to maintain. It is often very impractical. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to stop mid-paragraph, pull out my device and enter “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often forget to do), conscientiously browsing through my growing word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate maybe 5% of these terms into my everyday conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them remain like exhibits – admired and catalogued but seldom used.

Still, it’s made my mind much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less frequently for the same tired handful of descriptors, and more often for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the exact word you were searching for – like locating the missing component that locks the image into position.

At a time when our gadgets siphon off our focus with merciless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the pleasure of exercising a intellect that, after a long time of slack scrolling, is at last waking up again.