Lost in the Infinite Scroll – Until a Small Ritual Restored My Passion for Reading

As a child, I devoured books until my vision grew hazy. Once my GCSEs came around, I exercised the stamina of a monk, revising for hours without a break. But in lately, I’ve observed that capacity for intense focus dissolve into infinite scrolling on my device. My attention span now contracts like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for someone who creates content for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I came across a term I didn’t know – whether in a book, an piece, or an casual discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few moments reviewing the list back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now covers almost 20 pages, and this small habit has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with uncommon 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 term, I feel a slight stretch, as though some neglected part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very process of noticing, logging and revising it breaks the slide into passive, semi-skimmed attention.

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

Not that it’s an easy routine to maintain. It is often extremely impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, pull 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 built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), conscientiously scrolling through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate perhaps five percent of these words into my daily conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them remain like exhibits – appreciated and catalogued but rarely handled.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much keener. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more often for something exact and strong. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the exact word you were seeking – like finding the missing component that snaps the image into place.

At a time when our devices siphon off our focus with merciless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use my own as a instrument for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after years of slack scrolling, is finally waking up again.