I refer to the commentary by Professor Michael Chee, “When your body tells you it needs rest, pay attention” (Jan 9).

For many of us, sleep is neither easy nor readily available. Few of us go easily into slumber without something to smooth the way, be it the Netflix show or browsing social media. And few can wake up the next morning without some form of caffeine. We are losing the knack and taste for rest.

Our need for restful sleep is struggling against the effort to adjust to new and constraining conditions: impossible schedules, nighttime lights, overseas flights, a cocktail of stimulants and sedatives, and hyper-vigilant nervous systems. We have come to accept these behaviours as ordinary, even normal, but they are neither appropriate nor healthy. They are signs of distress in our day and age.

We do not have to live this way. We can change the conditions under which we sleep. It is simply a matter of shifting our focus from the demands of our days to the needs and offerings of our nights under the covers.

Sleep shapes who we are as much as we shape it. It colours our perceptions, regulates our moods, alters our interactions, and determines our health to such an extent that we barely know ourselves apart from its influence.

When we lose sleep or rush in and out of it without looking back, we bind ourselves to the blindness it seeks to remedy.

Sherman Goh Keng Hwee