🔗 Share this article

As a youngster, I devoured books until my eyes blurred. Once my exams came around, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without a break. But in lately, I’ve observed that ability for deep concentration fade into infinite browsing on my phone. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the tap of a finger. Reading for pleasure feels less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for a person who writes for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a small vow: every time I came across a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and record it. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few minutes reviewing the list back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny habit has been quietly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I search for and record a word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, documenting and reviewing it breaks the slide into passive, semi-skimmed 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 listening to.

It's not as if it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is often extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause mid-paragraph, take out my phone and type “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can reduce my pace to a frustrating speed. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I often neglect to do), conscientiously scrolling through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a word test.

Realistically, I integrate maybe five percent of these terms into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but rarely handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something precise and strong. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the perfect word you were searching for – like finding the missing component that locks the image into place.

In an era when our devices drain our attention with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use my own as a tool for slow thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the joy of exercising a intellect that, after years of slack browsing, is at last stirring again.