Have you ever tried tickling yourself?  Go ahead, pick your most ticklish part and try it if you haven’t before……..nothing right.  So why is that?  It turns out that to be tickled requires unpredictable movement/touching and the movement of our own hands is of course predictable to us.  This is why we do get tickled when someone else does it or if we touch that same spot with a feather.  The movement of others as well as the movement of the feather, which doesn’t quite move in the direction you move it, is unpredictable to us.

This is just one example of how our brain responds differently when something unpredictable happens and this different response from our brain is the reason why many of us like spontaneity!  It’s a different feeling when something happens to us throughout the day that we didn’t expect.  Just think of a time when you just grabbed the keys of your car and took off without really knowing where you were going, or when you decided to go on a vacation to a new destination and took off the very next day.  These occasions might have resulted in some of your best experiences and this wouldn’t have been the case if you had it all planned out.  Bottom line, be spontaneous!

Several years ago I took an assignment in Mexico and my wife and I decided that this would be a great opportunity to visit some of the great places Mexico has to offer, so we created a plan.  Our first destination was Cancun and the Mayan Riviera.  I easily spent more than 8 hours planning this trip, from researching hotels to planning activities for every day we would spend there.  When we returned from our trip, my wife and I both agreed this was the best vacation we had ever taken!  In contrast, we’ve taken trips where we just head out and don’t spend much time planning, and often we’ve found ourselves spending a great part of the day at the hotel trying to figure out how to best spend the day.  Bottom line, be a planner!

So should we be spontaneous or be a planner?  Who said you had to pick one!  I think the reason we enjoyed our “planned trip” so much is because the experiences we had there were new and so we weren’t sure what to expect, even if we had planned them, which added the spontaneity.