Lost in the Infinite Scroll – Until a Simple Practice Restored My Passion for Reading

When I was a youngster, I consumed books until my eyes blurred. When my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the endurance of a monk, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in lately, I’ve watched that ability for deep concentration fade into infinite browsing on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the tap of a finger. Reading for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for someone who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I came across a term I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an piece, or an casual discussion – I would research it and record it. Nothing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reading the list back in an attempt to lodge the word into my recall.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been subtly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I look up and record a term, I feel a slight stretch, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, logging and revising it breaks the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

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

It's not as if it’s an easy routine to maintain. It is often very impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to stop in the middle, take out my phone and type “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the stranger squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I often forget to do), conscientiously scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe 5% of these terms into my everyday conversation. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” too. But the majority of them remain like exhibits – appreciated and listed but rarely handled.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much sharper. I find myself turning less frequently for the same tired handful of descriptors, and more often for something exact and muscular. Few things are more gratifying than discovering the exact term you were searching for – like locating the lost puzzle piece that snaps the image into position.

At a time when our devices drain our attention with merciless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use my own as a instrument for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the joy of exercising a mind that, after a long time of slack scrolling, is finally stirring again.