🔗 Share this article

When I was a youngster, I consumed novels until my eyes blurred. When my exams came around, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, studying for hours without pause. But in lately, I’ve observed that ability for deep concentration fade into endless scrolling on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Engaging with books for enjoyment feels less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for a person who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to restore that cognitive flexibility, to stop the brain rot.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would research it and record it. Nothing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few moments reading the collection back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny habit has been subtly life-changing. The payoff is less about showing off with obscure descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and record a word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of spotting, documenting and revising it breaks the slide into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

There is also a journalling element to it – it functions as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a word test.

Realistically, I integrate maybe 5% of these words into my daily speech. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them stay like exhibits – appreciated and listed but seldom handled.

Still, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less often for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the exact word you were seeking – like locating the missing component that snaps the picture into position.

At a time when our gadgets drain our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d forfeited – the joy of engaging a mind that, after a long time of slack browsing, is at last waking up again.