I was just about to type "same reason I waste so much money on Heroin" but you pretty much beat me to it :)
That hit of pain is just a small feeling of loss for part of your childhood self, when you were all potential and didn't have to make any real choices. With each choice made, with each position we commit to, we expend some amount of our potential and turn it to something actual. The reward for this is obvious, the development of an adult self, a self we have chosen. The cost is less obvious, what if the person that you become cannot possibly live up to the ideal image of self you had as a child? What if you don't like the person that you become/are becoming? In fact, what if you can't even decide whether to like them or not because you're unsure of what your own values are?
The whole process of adulting can induce grief for the loss of an ideal, or anxiety over ambivalence towards one's self. Whether this happens or not probably is, at least partly, a result of what happened to you in childhood. Another part of it is probably genetic predisposition.
Anyway, the mild form of this is just procrastination, you avoid the anxiety of dealing with choices by doing something to sooth "that small hit of pain", but the price of that is wasting time and letting problems mount, which leads to worse anxiety, which leads to more procrastination. In more severe cases, when soothing behaviours no longer work, you get in to substance abuse and there are a whole of other ills.
That hit of pain is just a small feeling of loss for part of your childhood self, when you were all potential and didn't have to make any real choices. With each choice made, with each position we commit to, we expend some amount of our potential and turn it to something actual. The reward for this is obvious, the development of an adult self, a self we have chosen. The cost is less obvious, what if the person that you become cannot possibly live up to the ideal image of self you had as a child? What if you don't like the person that you become/are becoming? In fact, what if you can't even decide whether to like them or not because you're unsure of what your own values are?
The whole process of adulting can induce grief for the loss of an ideal, or anxiety over ambivalence towards one's self. Whether this happens or not probably is, at least partly, a result of what happened to you in childhood. Another part of it is probably genetic predisposition.
Anyway, the mild form of this is just procrastination, you avoid the anxiety of dealing with choices by doing something to sooth "that small hit of pain", but the price of that is wasting time and letting problems mount, which leads to worse anxiety, which leads to more procrastination. In more severe cases, when soothing behaviours no longer work, you get in to substance abuse and there are a whole of other ills.
Hope that helps in some way.