🔗 Share this article

When I was a youngster, I consumed books until my vision grew hazy. When my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, revising for lengthy periods without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for deep focus fade into infinite browsing on my device. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Reading 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 made me sad. I aimed to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a modest vow: every time I came across a term I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an piece, or an casual discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few minutes reading the collection back in an effort to imprint the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been quietly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I look up and record a term, I feel a slight expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in conversation, the very act of spotting, logging and revising it interrupts the slide into inactive, superficial focus.

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

It's not as if it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my device and enter “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the stranger squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these words into my everyday speech. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but seldom handled.

Still, it’s made my mind much sharper. I find myself turning less often for the same tired selection of adjectives, and more frequently for something precise and strong. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the exact word you were seeking – like finding the lost component that locks the image into position.

At a time when our devices siphon off our focus with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is at last waking up again.