🔗 Share this article

As a youngster, I consumed novels until my eyes blurred. Once my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a monk, revising for lengthy periods without pause. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for intense concentration fade into infinite browsing on my phone. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a modest vow: every time I came across a term I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard conversation – I would research it and record it. Not a thing fancy, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reviewing the list back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now spans almost twenty sheets, and this tiny habit has been quietly life-changing. The payoff is less about showing off with uncommon adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I look up and note a term, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of spotting, documenting and reviewing it breaks the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed attention.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it acts as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an easy routine 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 squeezed against me. It can reduce my pace to a maddening crawl. (The Kindle, with its integrated dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my growing word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I incorporate maybe five percent of these terms into my daily speech. “unreformable” was adopted. “mournful” too. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but rarely used.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my thinking much sharper. I find myself reaching less often for the same overused selection of descriptors, and more often for something exact and strong. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the exact word you were searching for – like finding the missing puzzle piece that locks the picture into place.

At a time when our devices drain our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a tool for slow thought. 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 browsing, is at last stirring again.