🔗 Share this article

As a child, I devoured novels until my eyes blurred. When my GCSEs came around, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, revising for hours without pause. But in lately, I’ve observed that capacity for intense focus fade into infinite browsing on my device. My focus now contracts like a snail at the touch of a finger. Reading for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to regain that mental elasticity, 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 know – whether in a novel, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing fancy, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a running list kept, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reading the collection back in an effort to imprint the word into my recall.

The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this small habit has been quietly life-changing. The payoff is less about showing off with uncommon adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in conversation, the very act of noticing, logging and reviewing it breaks the slide into passive, superficial focus.

There is also a journalling aspect to it – it functions as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an simple routine to keep up. It is often very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, take out my phone and type “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my pace to a frustrating crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate maybe 5% of these terms into my daily speech. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “mournful” as well. But most of them stay like museum pieces – appreciated and listed but seldom handled.

Still, it’s rendered my thinking much sharper. I find myself turning less frequently for the same tired selection of descriptors, and more often for something precise and strong. Few things are more satisfying than discovering the perfect term you were searching for – like finding the missing component that snaps the picture into position.

In an era when our gadgets siphon off our focus with relentless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the joy of engaging a mind that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is finally stirring again.