Why speed up your reaction? Today’s world lives at an incredibly fast pace which sets high demands for individuals that make up these dynamic societies. As one defining trait of such societies is competition, our desire to excel in all aspects is understandable. Our speed of reaction to the surrounding world is one of those aspects.
Reaction times might refer either to motor skills or mental speed. Fortunately, in both cases, reaction time can be trained to a great extent through extensive practice. Importantly, practising a particular reaction-improving activity can benefit your reaction speed across many other dimensions. Below, we offer some key advice on how to become faster.
This one is a key prerequisite for any other attempt of improving reaction times. We have all felt on our own skin how much sleep deprivation can slow us down. Apart from doing that, chronic sleep deprivation is also associated with colossal health risks, especially for the cardiovascular system.
According to the current model, it is considered that when sleeping, the space between our nerve cells increases allowing more blood flow, which helps eliminate all the waste products resulting from daily activity.
Since this is expected to work best only during quality sleep, you should regard with a huge dose of scepticism all those self-declared “hacks” that boast to help cut on your sleeping time while maintaining good health and productivity. Nature wanted us to sleep 8 hours for a reason.
Researchers in cognitive science at the University of Rochester carried out a study which demonstrated that playing action video games increased the speed of decision making in the test group without affecting the accuracy of these decisions.
This was accompanied by an increase in alertness to events in the surrounding environment. It is considered that playing action video games also improve reaction in a variety of other activities, such as driving, navigating through space, keeping track of people in a crowd, as well as multitasking.
As mentioned, reaction times don’t refer only to motor skills but also to the speed with which you can react to or process information, for instance, how fast you can recall memories or how fast you can make decisions based on certain content.
However, being able to perform fast operations on content related to a particular discipline depends directly on how well you understood and memorized it.
One way of assimilating content efficiently is by performing writing assignments on it. Find a set of guides teaching fast and reliable assignment help, how to structure the paragraphs of the main body, how to write the conclusion, etc. Once you understand these aspects well enough, written assignments would become your best friend.
Sports have a direct influence on our health, well-being, cognitive abilities, and overall reaction speed. One reason is that most sports require fast decision making – each second, the body needs to decide whether to stay or to act, which direction to move or hit, what force should be applied, whom to pass the ball, etc.
Another reason is that sports increase oxygen delivery and blood circulation throughout the body, including the brain. These benefits last even after the physical activity and exert a positive influence on a range of cognitive tasks. Find here a list of recommendations to help increase reaction speed in sports.
A study carried at the University of Amsterdam and at Leiden University indicated that consumption of tyrosine, a non-essential amino acid, contributed to faster reaction times in test subjects. You can find this ingredient in spinach, eggs, meat, cheese, nuts, seeds, and many other high-protein foods.
Above, we listed some of the most well-known methods of how to improve reaction time but there are other examples as well, some of them curious. For instance, a 2010 scientific study claimed that meditation can significantly improve psychomotor vigilance, or in other words, reaction time.
Other useful activities in this context could be playing a particular reaction time game, speed reading, and even chewing something (the latter is supposed to increase blood flow to the brain). Most likely you’ll be willing to combine different practices to ensure balance and harmony in your daily routine. For instance, this article explores how to combine studying with sports.
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