🔗 Share this article

When I was a child, I devoured novels until my vision blurred. When my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, revising for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that ability for deep focus dissolve into infinite scrolling on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the tap of a finger. Reading for enjoyment seems less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for a person who creates content for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a modest promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an article, or an casual discussion – I would look it up and record it. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reading the list back in an attempt to imprint the word into my recall.

The list now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been quietly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I search for and note a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some underused part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never use “phantom” in conversation, the very process of spotting, logging and revising it breaks the drift into passive, superficial focus.

There is also a diary-keeping aspect to it – it functions as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an simple routine to maintain. It is often extremely inconvenient. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating speed. (The Kindle, with its integrated dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), conscientiously scrolling through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I incorporate maybe 5% of these terms into my daily conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “mournful” as well. But most of them stay like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but seldom used.

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

At a time when our devices drain our focus with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d forfeited – the joy of engaging a intellect that, after years of lazy browsing, is finally stirring again.