How to Train Your Brain to Think Faster: 15 Simple Tips

It is clear that fast thinking is a desirable skill for both adults and kids. You can improve your thinking speed with brain exercises and small changes in your lifestyle. Let’s learn how to think faster together.

15 Simple Tips for Learning How to Think Faster

If you wonder how to think better and faster, the answer is balancing a healthy lifestyle and training the brain with the right exercises. Discover how to think faster and get smarter!

1. Practice with MentalUP

Mental and physical exercises are essential to improving fast thinking skills. As an effective way, the MentalUP app benefits overall mental performance. If you think now is the right time to support both your kids’ and your development, you can check out these boosting games.

MentalUP’s memory, concentration, and logic games improve the overall learning ability of individuals and support essential skills, like attention, problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity, and concentration, that improve the brain’s processing speed and fast thinking skills.

Also, MentalUP fitness exercises and activities enhance cognitive function and support the physical development of individuals, which is essential for improved fast thinking skills.

2. Exercise Regularly

Physical exercise increases the blood flow to the brain and supports the release of essential hormones, like endorphins and serotonin, that enhance brain processing speed.

Thus, regular exercise can help you think faster, stay focused and improve your long and short-term memory. All types of exercise are essential for supporting fast thinking skills. Still, a daily aerobic exercise routine is one of the best ways to improve brain health and processing speed.

3. Eat Healthy

A balanced diet is essential for both mental and physical health, and consuming nutritional-rich brain boosting foods is especially important for improving mental performance.

Thus, to support your brain development and cognitive functioning, you should consume foods that include vitamins, healthy fats, and antioxidants.

Having a healthy diet might not teach you how to think faster, but it surely contributes to your fast thinking skills.

4. Get Enough Sleep

Sleep affects every single system of your body and mind. Thus, if you want to learn how to think faster and make a decision easily, you should ensure that you get enough sleep before training your brain.

For people over the age of 18, seven to nine hours of night sleep is optimal. For kids, this time can reach up to 11 hours of sleep. To ensure that you and your kids get enough sleep, you can create a nightly sleep routine and support it with calming activities.

5. Solve Puzzles

Puzzles are a great workout for your brain, and they are suitable for people of all ages. Plus, it is a great activity to spend quality time with as a family.

Puzzles can exercise both sides of your brain, improve your long and short-term memory, and enhance critical skills, like problem-solving, critical thinking, and visual and spatial thinking.

6. Meditate

Meditation enhances communication between brain cells and speeds mental processing in turn. Also, meditation improves the ability to learn and concentrate.

Regular meditation practice with your family members can be a great idea to keep you mentally sharp and build a more efficient brain by stimulating the formation of new brain cells and neural connections. Plus, wellness activities like meditation also contribute to stress management skills.

7. Play Word Games

Word games are great for sharpening the executive functioning of your brain and support essential skills like critical thinking and problem-solving.

Word games strengthen your executive functioning and control by supporting cognitive flexibility, concentration, and verbal fluency. So practicing your cognitive skills with word games, such as Scrabble, Sudoku, or Wordle, is a great idea to learn how to think and talk faster.

8. Read

Reading stimulates every part of your brain as well as the neutral connections between them. As a result, reading boosts your intelligence and improves your dexterity.

As reading requires multiple cognitive functions like attention, predicting, memory, reasoning, and comprehension, it is essential for both kids and adults to improve processing speed and fast thinking skills.

9. Learn a New Skill

Pushing yourself in fresh directions is one of the most contributional things you can do to build better fast thinking skills.

You can learn a new language, start playing an instrument or find a different skill to hone. Having new experiences will help your brain grow new pathways and enable you to perform better on new tasks by improving your fast thinking skills.

10. Rest Your Mind

The human brain requires a great amount of energy to function properly. Thus, any lack of rest, relaxation, or overthinking can reduce the efficiency of your brain and processing speed.

Thus, resting your mind is as significant as resting your body to improve your fast thinking skills. To rest your mind and senses, you can arrange daily times in which you can sit and relax without any interruptions. Also, mindfulness can be very helpful for this purpose.

11. Get More Social

Interacting with others can actually train our brains by improving social motivation, memory formation, and recall processes. It is also good for protecting the brain from neurological diseases.

Getting social is not all about going out with friends. You can also participate in volunteering activities, invite your friends over more often, or join sports clubs or speaking groups.

Getting involved in different activities and environments and meeting new people will help your brain produce new learning pathways and improve your vision as well as your fast thinking skills.

12. Exercise Timed Writing

Timed exercises are great for learning how to think fast under pressure. Thus, this timed writing exercise is both good for your fast thinking and literacy skills.

Start by writing down a variety of writing prompts and tossing them into a jar. Then, you can set one out and start your timer for 3-5 minutes to write on that topic until the timer goes off. When you are finished, count how many words you used and how much your writing makes sense.

If you do this activity regularly, you will be surprised when you see how much it contributes to your fast thinking skills.

13. Practice Speed

We all have some things we are good at. It can be cooking, playing an instrument, or drawing. Whatever it is, adding another layer of challenge by speeding them up is beneficial to our fast thinking skills and overall mental performance.

You can start by timing yourself on completing your daily tasks or demonstrating your skills. All you need to do is set a timer and test how much time you spend. Then, you can gradually shorten it by improving your brain’s reaction times.

14. Play Card Games

Playing card games is a mentally stimulating activity for both adults and kids. Playing card games can lead to greater volume in several regions of the brain and improve memory and overall thinking skills.

You can go with Uno, Crazy Eights, Blitz, or Monopoly and play these card games with your friends and family to both improve your fast thinking skills and have a good time.

15. Vary Your Routines

Practicing intentional variety is essential to supporting our brains to obtain new learning paths and improve mental performance, as completing the same routines every day can reduce the processing speed of our brains.

Intentional variety is not as hard as it sounds. You can simply take a new route when you are on the way back home, meet some new friends, change your grocery store, taste entirely different foods, or listen to a music genre that you have never heard before.

4 Factors That Cause Slow Thinking

Until now, we have learned useful tips to learn how to think better and faster. Now it is time to realize the factors that can reduce your overall mental performance and result in longer reaction times and inadequate fast thinking skills.

Let’s discover the 4 factors that slow your thinking!

1. A Busy Schedule

If you have an overflowing calendar, you probably don’t have enough time to just think. This is one of the essential factors that reduce mental performance and result in people having slower thinking skills.

So if you want to accelerate your thinking skills, you should create a daily thinking time for yourself. You don’t need hours to practice thinking. Including 30 minutes of daily thinking time in your schedule might be enough.

You can also provide this thinking time for your kids to help them stay mentally sharp when dealing with school tasks.

2. Poor Nutrition

The brain’s most important job is to communicate with other cells in the brain and the rest of the body. This communication allows us to perform both physical and cognitive tasks. To complete this process successfully, the brain needs to be supported with proper nutrition and exercise routines.

Thus, consuming nutritionally poor foods is a reducing factor for cognitive tasks like thinking, learning, memorizing, and planning. You can have some fast food and unhealthy snacks from time to time, but still, it is important to keep things balanced by having a healthy diet.

3. Lack of Lexicon

Without having a large vocabulary, it is not possible to build better fast thinking skills, as literacy is an important factor for cognitive development.

So if you feel you don’t think fast enough, the reason might be your lack of lexical knowledge. Still, you don’t need to worry too much. There are plenty of activities to practice your lexical knowledge, such as speed reading, speed writing, memory games, and using a dictionary.

4. Stress

Having high-stress levels can increase blood pressure, weaken the immune system, and cause brain fog, which is a condition that affects one’s cognitive function.

If you are experiencing chronic stress, you might be suffering from memory problems, lack of mental clarity, poor concentration, and inability to focus.

All these symptoms can be factors that slow your thinking. Thus, it is essential to learn how to manage stress to improve your mental performance.

Fast Thinking vs. Efficient, Accurate Thinking

Now, you might be thinking that fast thinking is a must-have skill, but actually, efficient and accurate thinking is as important as thinking quickly.

Therefore, thinking efficiently is not about panicking and coming up with quick decisions. It is more about going into action mode and making accurate decisions as fast as you can.

Benefits of Fast Thinking

Fast thinking enables people to solve problems more efficiently and easily, improves their academic performance, and creates a great advantage for having a successful career.

In addition, this essential skill benefits aspects of life in many ways:

• According to the Association for Psychological Science, when people are asked to think faster, they are more likely to feel happier. Also, this research shows that when people are made to think quickly, they feel more energetic, creative, powerful, and self-assured.
• Fast thinking enhances goal setting, planning, and problem-solving skills. Also, it enables people to stay focused and supports their ability to learn new subjects.
• Building faster-thinking skills during their youth can help people stay mentally sharp in their older years.
• It benefits one’s social life. When humans recognize that they have better fast-thinking skills than others, they feel more confident speaking in front of others and participating in group activities.
• Students with fast thinking skills spend their time more efficiently when completing homework and exams.
• For athletes, improving fast learning skills leads to better athletic performance by quickening their reaction times.

Now you might be thinking about how to think faster on your feet and train your brain to improve your mental performance. You are in luck because we are just about to discover 15 simple tips for learning how to train your brain to think faster.

Frequently Asked Questions

When it comes to thinking faster and improving mental performance, there are a lot of common questions that arise. To help you understand the concept better and answer all your questions about this topic, we have compiled all the frequently asked questions.

Get ready for all your questions to be answered!