🔗 Share this article

When I was a child, I consumed books until my vision grew hazy. When my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a monk, revising for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for intense focus dissolve into endless browsing on my phone. My focus now contracts like a slug at the touch of a finger. Reading for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that cognitive flexibility, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would research it and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reading the collection back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, and this small habit has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about showing off with uncommon descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I look up and note a term, I feel a slight stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, documenting and reviewing it breaks the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed focus.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it functions 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 habit to maintain. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to stop mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and type “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can slow my pace to a frustrating speed. (The Kindle, with its integrated lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I often forget to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

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

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my thinking much keener. I notice I'm reaching less frequently for the same tired selection of adjectives, and more often for something exact and strong. Rarely are more satisfying than unearthing the exact word you were searching for – like finding the missing puzzle piece that snaps the image into position.

In an era when our gadgets drain our attention with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the joy of engaging a mind that, after a long time of slack browsing, is at last waking up again.