🔗 Share this article

When I was a child, I devoured novels until my eyes blurred. Once my exams arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for intense focus dissolve into infinite scrolling on my device. My attention span now shrinks like a snail at the touch of a finger. Reading for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who creates content for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an piece, or an casual conversation – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few minutes reviewing the list back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I search for and record a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, logging and revising it interrupts the drift into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

Additionally, there's a journalling aspect to it – it functions as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my phone and enter “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person pressed against me. It can reduce my reading to a frustrating speed. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often neglect to do), dutifully scrolling through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a word test.

Realistically, I incorporate maybe five percent of these words into my daily conversation. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “mournful” as well. But the majority of them remain like exhibits – appreciated and listed but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my mind much keener. I find myself turning less frequently for the same tired handful of descriptors, and more often for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than unearthing the exact term you were seeking – like locating the lost component that snaps the picture into place.

At a time when our gadgets siphon off our attention with relentless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after years of lazy browsing, is at last waking up again.