Some Reaction‐Diffusion equations present solutions of the traveling wave form. In this work, we present an implicit numerical scheme based on finite difference originally proposed to solve hyperbolic equations. Then, this method is improved using a pseudospectral approach to discretize the spatial variable. The results prove that this new scheme is useful to solve equations of the parabolic type which presents traveling wave solutions. In particular, problems where a reduction in the number of discretization points and an increase of the size of the time step play an important role in their solution are considered. The implicit scheme presented involves the solution of linear systems only. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq 32: 86–105, 2016