🔗 Share this article

As a youngster, I consumed books until my vision blurred. When my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, revising for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for intense concentration dissolve into endless browsing on my device. My focus now contracts like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to stop the brain rot.

So, about a year ago, I made a small promise: every time I encountered a term I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an article, or an casual conversation – I would look it up and record it. Nothing fancy, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, ironically, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reviewing the list back in an effort to imprint the word into my recall.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, 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 ritual. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of spotting, documenting and revising it breaks the slide into inactive, superficial attention.

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

It's not as if it’s an easy routine to keep up. It is often very impractical. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to stop in the middle, pull out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the person squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating speed. (The Kindle, with its built-in dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously scrolling through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate maybe 5% of these terms into my daily conversation. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them stay like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but rarely handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my mind much sharper. I find myself reaching less often for the same tired selection of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and muscular. Rarely are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect term you were searching for – like locating the missing component that locks the picture into position.

At a time when our devices drain our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use mine as a instrument for deliberate thinking. And it has given me back something I worried I’d lost – the joy of engaging a mind that, after years of lazy browsing, is at last waking up again.