The Economics of Insomnia

上学期，也就是2025年5月20日，偶发失眠，半夜辗转反侧，突然有了经济学灵感，特作此散文。

Given a person who has trouble sleeping. In general, this individual tends to either lying on the bed trying very hard to fall asleep, or leave the bed and start to do something that consumes energy to make it easier to fall asleep later.

给定一个难以入眠的人。一般来说，这个人要们倾向于躺在床上艰难入睡，要么起身下床做些消耗精力的事情助眠。

From this, we could find a paradoxical phenomenon. If trying hard to fall asleep, it involves a probability determined by his psychological status, mental activity, room temperatures, and so on. But if stop sleeping, the next day is for sure going to be tiring and causing greater disutility in pschological term and inefficiency in physical term.

从这件事，我们可以发现一个似乎极为矛盾的现象。如果躺在床上试着入眠，这件事情涉及到很多外在条件引起的概率，比如他本人的心理状况、脑部活动烈度、房间温度诸如此类。但是如果下床活动，此人第二天必然状态不佳，而且可能导致心理上的效用减少以及生理上的效率低下。

It appears that the situation kept this person from doing productive work whille having insomnia because of the fear of the potential disutility, but the low probability of falling asleep kept him away from using this time for productive work. The reason for this inaction might lie in the fact that the uncertainty associated with sleeping is too high and disutility involved in the next day is unmeasureable. That is, we are certain that not sleeping is for sure going to cause disutility, but by how much is unknown; we are certain that the probability of falling asleep is unknown. Thus, the issue here is we are unable to compare the relative harm between two negative impacts, which leads to a greater loss, that is the potential productivity of insomina. People rather choose beating the odds of sleeping than to embrace the certain disutility, I wonder what would this in economic terms looks like.

他下床活动而必然面临的风险似乎让他不得不去忍受失眠的困扰，但是入睡的概率如此之低以至于他不能把等待入眠的这段时间用在更具效率的工作上。这种刻意的无行动的原因似乎就潜藏在入睡可能性的高度不确定和低效用的不可测度上。这就是说，我们非常清楚不睡觉一定会导致心理上的效用递减，但是不确定到底减多少；我们非常确定入睡的概率不确定。因此，问题的根源在于我们无法比较两个负面影响的相对危害性，但这种不确定性导致了更大的损失，那就是失眠期间本可以用起来的高效率。人们宁可躺在床上挣扎入睡也不愿意接受不确定的心理效用损失，我在想这种现象应该用什么经济学词汇来描述。

It’s just like a person having a fixed amount of capital at hand. The inflation is certain, then he knows that the monetary value is for sure to drop; but, if we assume that financial market is highly uncertain for monetary return, then we would observe an interesting phenomenon as the person do nothing to prevent the loss and look his monetary value decrease each year until he does not care about it anymore.

这简直就像一个有着固定资产的人。通货膨胀是确定的，所以此人明确指导资产的货币价值不断贬低；但是，如果我们假设资产市场有着高度不确定的利息回报，我们就能观察到一个有趣的现象——这个人没有做任何能保护其资产的事情并任其资产不断贬值直到他麻木到不在乎。

Is there anything else he could have possibly done? In insomnia cases, individual could still read a book or enjoy a movie that compensate the utility; in financial market case, there aren’t many things he could have done. Spending those money would only cause greater uncertainty in future and greater disutility in future for sure. In other words, if we are living in a highly uncertain world, providing a sense of certainty would surely mark up the disutility this individual might have.

他有其他可以做的事情吗？在失眠的情况，一个人仍然可以去阅读或者欣赏一部电影来弥补效用的损失；在资产市场的例子中，此人却没有太多选择。把资产消费掉只会导致未来的不确定性变高且必然导致效用下降。这也就是说，如果我们生活在一个高度不确定的世界中，任何一点确定性的补偿都会弥补一个人损失的效用。