🔗 Share this article

When I was a youngster, I devoured novels until my eyes grew hazy. When my exams arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a monk, revising for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for deep focus fade into infinite scrolling on my phone. My focus now contracts like a snail at the tap of a finger. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to restore that cognitive flexibility, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would research it and record it. Not a thing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few minutes reading the collection back in an attempt to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been subtly life-changing. The benefit is less about showing off with uncommon adjectives – which, let’s face it, 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 slight expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “phantom” in conversation, the very process of spotting, documenting and revising it breaks the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed focus.

There is also a diary-keeping aspect to it – it acts 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 habit to maintain. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, take out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my pace to a frustrating crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I incorporate maybe five percent of these words into my daily speech. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “mournful” too. But most of them stay like museum pieces – admired and listed but seldom handled.

Still, it’s made my mind much keener. I notice I'm reaching less often for the same tired selection of descriptors, and more often for something exact and strong. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the perfect word you were seeking – like finding the lost component that snaps the picture into position.

At a time when our devices siphon off our focus with relentless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use my own as a instrument for slow thinking. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a mind that, after a long time of slack scrolling, is finally stirring again.