How to Improve Reaction Time

Can you improve your reaction time?

Yes, within limits. Reaction time has two parts: noticing the signal and getting your body to respond. In a large lab study, simply detecting a visual signal took about 131 ms in adults of every age, while the slowing that comes with age happened almost entirely in the movement part (Woods and others, 2015). Neither part can be trained down to nothing, but a lot of what makes people slow on a given day has nothing to do with their nervous system's limit.

A note on wording: people often ask how to increase reaction time when they mean reacting faster. Since reaction time is measured in milliseconds, getting quicker actually means a lower number, so this guide talks about improving it.

It helps to separate three kinds of improvement:

Measure before you change anything. Take our reaction time test a few times on the same device to get a baseline median, then use it, or the ruler drop calculator further down, to see what actually works for you.

Faster today: quick wins

Sleep

Nothing on this page undoes a short night. A meta-analysis of sleep deprivation studies found that simple attention tasks, including speeded reaction tasks, were hit hardest, while complex reasoning held up better (Lim and Dinges, 2010). If your scores drop on a particular day, check how you slept before blaming your reflexes.

Readiness and expectation

You react faster to a signal you're prepared for. Driving research shows how big the effect can be: a driver expecting to brake responds in about 0.7 seconds, but a genuine surprise takes around 1.5 seconds (Green). Even the short gaps in a lab matter: in the 2015 study, reactions were slower when the signal came after a shorter wait. In sport and games, staying in a ready position and narrowing your attention to the cue that matters is the quickest legitimate speed-up there is.

A bout of moderate exercise

Exercise sharpens responses while you're doing it and shortly after. Across studies, the overall effect of a single bout of exercise on thinking is small but positive (Chang and others, 2012), and it shows up mainly as speed: a meta-analysis that compared intensities found that "speed accounted for most of the effect", with moderate-intensity exercise beating both light and very hard exercise (McMorris and Hale, 2012). A brisk warm-up before a match or a gaming session is exactly that.

Caffeine

A review of caffeine research found that low to moderate doses, about 40 to 300 mg, improve "alertness, vigilance, attention, reaction time", with less consistent effects on memory and judgment (McLellan and others, 2016). The US Food and Drug Administration puts a 12-ounce cup of regular brewed coffee at about 113 to 247 mg, so one cup sits inside that range. It is a temporary boost rather than a skill, and it can't make up for being badly short of sleep.

Your equipment

On any screen-based test or game, part of your "reaction time" is your hardware. A wired mouse, a monitor with a high refresh rate, and closing other programs all reduce the delay between the event and the moment it registers. Our reaction time test explains where device delay comes from in more detail.

Best exercises for reaction time

The honest answer from the research is that the best exercise is the one closest to what you want to get faster at. A landmark review of brain-training studies found "extensive evidence that brain-training interventions improve performance on the trained tasks, less evidence that such interventions improve performance on closely related tasks, and little evidence" of gains on distantly related tasks or in everyday life (Simons and others, 2016). Train the reaction you need.

Practise the exact reaction

A goalkeeper should face shots, a sprinter should practise starts, and a gamer should play the game. Repetition makes the signal familiar and the response automatic, which cuts the decision part of the reaction. Mick Schumacher described the result at F1 starts: "If you were to think about everything, the reaction time will slow down", a point our F1 reaction test explores.

Reaction drills

For general sporting reactions, coaches use simple drills that train seeing and responding together:

• Ruler or stick drops. A partner drops a ruler without warning and you catch it. It doubles as a test; see the calculator below.
• Ball drops and wall catches. A partner drops or bounces a ball unpredictably, or you catch an odd-shaped reaction ball off a wall.
• Partner cues. Sprint, shuffle or change direction on a clap, a shout or a pointed hand, so the response has to wait for the signal.
• Light boards. Walls of lights that you hit as they come on.

Expect these to make you better at the drills and at the sport movements they resemble. Don't expect them to lower your score on an unrelated screen test by much.

Action video games

Action games are unusual because the research suggests some broader benefits. A 2018 meta-analysis found that habitual action-game players outperformed non-players by about half a standard deviation on perceptual, attention and cognitive tasks, and that training studies, which compared action games with other commercial games, produced smaller gains of about a third of a standard deviation. The clearest effects were on top-down attention and spatial cognition, and the authors warned that published studies probably overstate the effect by about 30% (Bediou and others, 2018).

Regular aerobic exercise

Beyond the short-term boost, being fit seems to help. In a study of 120 medical students, those who exercised regularly reacted faster to both sights and sounds than sedentary students (Jain and others, 2015). That is a comparison rather than a trial, so it can't prove exercise caused the difference; trials of longer-term training are covered in our guide to improving processing speed.

A four-week reaction time training routine

This is a simple, sensible structure rather than a programme with proven results. It combines the things the evidence supports and keeps you measuring, so you can see what helps you.

1. Baseline and basics. Test five times on different days at the same time, on the same device. Fix your sleep and your setup before anything else.
2. Add specific practice. Ten minutes, four days a week, of the reaction you care about: starts, catches, game drills. Retest at the end of the week.
3. Add a warm-up. Before practice or play, five to ten minutes of moderate exercise that raises your heart rate without exhausting you.
4. Compare. Retest under the same conditions as week 1. Keep what moved your median and drop what didn't.

Judge progress by your median over several tries, not your single best. One lucky click can make any routine look like it worked.

How to improve reaction time for gaming

Gaming reactions combine noticing, deciding and aiming, so the advice above applies with a few additions:

• Cut the delay you don't control by reflex. Play on a responsive monitor and a wired mouse, close background programs, and keep your frame rate high.
• Warm up properly. A few minutes of an aim trainer or a casual match, plus some light movement, combines practice with the short-term boost from activity.
• Learn where to look. Much of what feels like faster reflexes in experienced players is anticipation: knowing where an opponent is likely to appear. That comes from playing the game, not from generic drills.
• Protect your sleep. Late-night sessions are a reliable way to lose the milliseconds you trained for.

The ruler drop test

The ruler drop is the classic way to measure reaction time without a computer, and because no screen or mouse is involved, it avoids device delay altogether. You need a ruler and a partner.

How to do the ruler drop test

1. Sit with your forearm resting on a table and your hand over the edge, thumb and index finger open about 2 cm apart.
2. Your partner holds a ruler vertically between your fingers, with the zero mark level with the top of your thumb.
3. Without any warning or countdown, your partner lets go. Catch the ruler as fast as you can, without moving your arm down.
4. Read the measurement at the top of your thumb and enter it above.
5. Do at least five catches, with your partner varying the moment they let go.

How the calculator works

A dropped ruler falls freely under gravity, so the distance it travels before you catch it tells you exactly how long you took. Distance fallen equals half of gravity times time squared, which rearranges to reaction time = √(2 × distance ÷ 9.81), with the distance in metres. A 20 cm catch is √(2 × 0.20 ÷ 9.81) ≈ 0.202 seconds.

Ruler drop test chart

Use it as a conversion table from centimetres or inches to milliseconds. Calculated with the free-fall equation above. A standard 30 cm ruler only measures up to about 247 ms; if it falls through your fingers, your reaction was slower than that, and a longer stick is needed.

What the research shows

Sports medicine researchers have turned the ruler drop into a clinical tool for checking athletes after head injuries, using a 1.3 m measuring stick set in a weighted disc. In 94 college football players, its average was 203 ms (give or take 20), against 268 ms (give or take 44) on a computerised reaction test, and the two measures were correlated (Eckner and others, 2010). A later study of 46 contact-sport athletes found the stick-drop test reliable from one session to the next and between testers, and judged it promising for assessing concussion (Eckner and others, 2015).

Advantages and disadvantages

• Advantages: cheap, quick, needs no screen, and removes device delay, which is why its times come out faster than computer tests.
• Disadvantages: it depends on your partner releasing without any tell, small reading errors matter, a short ruler caps the measurable time, and catching adds a grip movement that a button press doesn't need.

What won't help much

• Generic brain-training apps, for anything beyond the apps themselves, as the 2016 review found.
• Chasing your single best time. It mostly rewards lucky anticipation; your median is the honest measure.
• More caffeine than you need. The benefits in the review came at low to moderate doses, and caffeine can't replace sleep.
• Training while exhausted. Practising when you're badly tired measures your fatigue more than your speed.

Reaction time is also only a small part of how well you think. If you're curious about reasoning rather than speed, our free IQ test and our guide to increasing your IQ cover that side.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Simons, D. J. and others (2016). Do "brain-training" programs work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(3), 103–186.
• McMorris, T. and Hale, B. J. (2012). Differential effects of differing intensities of acute exercise on speed and accuracy of cognition: a meta-analytical investigation. Brain and Cognition, 80(3), 338–351.
• Chang, Y. K., Labban, J. D., Gapin, J. I. and Etnier, J. L. (2012). The effects of acute exercise on cognitive performance: a meta-analysis. Brain Research, 1453, 87–101.
• McLellan, T. M., Caldwell, J. A. and Lieberman, H. R. (2016). A review of caffeine's effects on cognitive, physical and occupational performance. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 71, 294–312.
• Bediou, B. and others (2018). Meta-analysis of action video game impact on perceptual, attentional, and cognitive skills. Psychological Bulletin, 144(1), 77–110.
• Lim, J. and Dinges, D. F. (2010). A meta-analysis of the impact of short-term sleep deprivation on cognitive variables. Psychological Bulletin, 136(3), 375–389.
• Eckner, J. T., Kutcher, J. S. and Richardson, J. K. (2010). Pilot evaluation of a novel clinical test of reaction time in National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I football players. Journal of Athletic Training, 45(4), 327–332.
• Eckner, J. T. and others (2015). Reliability and criterion validity of a novel clinical test of simple and complex reaction time in athletes. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 120(3), 841–859.
• Woods, D. L. and others (2015). Factors influencing the latency of simple reaction time. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 131.
• Jain, A. and others (2015). A comparative study of visual and auditory reaction times on the basis of gender and physical activity levels of medical first year students. International Journal of Applied and Basic Medical Research, 5(2), 124–127.
• US Food and Drug Administration. Spilling the beans: how much caffeine is too much?
• Green, M. Driver reaction time, Visual Expert.