"Blessings on him, who first invented sleep," eulogised Miguel de Cervantes, the legendary writer. Yet, the irony is there is a distinct, also alarming, lack of awareness about sleep in the community - general and medical. Many physicians, for instance, continue to simply miss, or ignore, the ever-cascading, veritable surplus of sleep-related disorders.

Would you believe it - that want of knowledge about sleep triggers far more tribulations than medical problems? This is puzzlingly more dramatic than medical chutzpah - most people around us are fatigued and exhausted every day, because they just don't seem to comprehend how to manage their sleep. What's more, they are deceived by their smattering of the mechanics of sleep-debt and the subtle bioclock that ticks inside us.

Sleep medicine is a fast-expanding branch of therapeutics, albeit the 'science of sleep' is as old as civilisation. The more we garner a plethora of minutiae as to what exactly the design of sleep is all about, the more apparent it becomes - the 'why' and 'how' of the electronic and technological advances of modern life that have swerved us away from our bodies' natural rhythms. The analogy is simple. Contemporary living is a clutter of bright lights and television, or OTT, entertainment - or, is it ennui? - not to speak of parabolic, or quirky, shifts at the 24/7 workplace. The resultant effect is obvious: we are literally giving a wallop to the inner bioclock that runs and maintains the synchronicity of our mind and body. In the process, we have managed to topple our marvellously-evolved bioclocks, including the composite biorhythms that reside in them. While technological blitz has robbed us of our natural order, we have, likewise, reset the bioclock and its control on our behaviour.

The practice of medicine, for ages, ended when the patient slept soundly - primarily because it occupied itself fully to illnesses and diseases that could be noticed and diagnosed in 'wakeful' patients. If our 'old' physicians thought about sleep at all, their beliefs needed to mirror a bias, that, "Sleep was always good, soothing, and enormously therapeutic."

Sleep was a general approximate, too - a frontier they could not navigate. The raison d'être: nothing awful could ever happen when the patient was comfortably cuddled up in bed. Things, of course, changed when the perceivable understanding of narcolepsy - a disorder marked by excessive daytime sleepiness - expanded in the early 1970s. Also, what engineered the new transformation was the recognition of yet another sleep malady - apnoea - in which our breathing is muddled. This was the turning point. It 'zeroed-in' a new, frenzied wave of sleep research: of what drives us to sleep and wakefulness, and why we feel conscious, animated, watchful, lethargic, sluggish, or sleepy? Result: sleep-arrears, or the 'conditional' mind, became the central theme.

It is a given that new research in the field of sleep medicine has corroborated one of nature's wisest aphorisms - that wholesome sleep holds a 'hands-on' prescription for longevity. This is a signpost far more influential than diet, exercise, or heredity. The inference is obvious. For our sleep-sick, sleep-deficit society, this is nothing short of a holistic prescription for vibrant, good health and optimal wellness - one that also celebrates the vital connection that exists between happiness, well-being and a good night's quality sleep.

The brain - the hub of our sentient consciousness and understanding - expresses and unites every activity of our conscious awareness. It shares a horde of thoughts and frames of mind at variable levels, just as much as it is in resonant consonance with a multitude of diverse functions that may not be perceptible. One could, therefore, call the brain our mind's 'watchful workstation' - a living constituent and also biological object that embodies our whole being, while synchronising our physiological repertoire, including sleep, with a surplus of states, right from the simple and the subtle to focusing and performing everyday routine as also complex tasks almost on auto-pilot.

While our consciousness animates every process in our mind, which is regulated and controlled by chemical synapses, our mindful state is wedged between natural and spontaneous activities of several neural components, which also epitomise the organic strength of our mind-body connect. This, in turn, is regulated by signals that drive our conscious senses and myriad functions during our wakeful hours and also through a goodnight's sleep. The whole process is, in more ways than one, formulated and extended by nature and nurture - a composite orchestra channelled through our thoughts, feelings, emotions and actions. It determines our inquisitiveness, or imaginings, into everything. Put simply, it articulates the quintessential basis of 'who we are,' what we express, or connote, during our journey through life, and not just existence.

The philosopher Aristotle always thought that there was a distinctive, collaborating and common communication between our body, mind and emotions. This may be interpreted as a grid having the expanse of two signals that emerge in opposite directions. Aristotle also formulated simple, easy-to-express ideas and observations that truly conformed to common sense thinking. Their contexts explain the fact that emotions not only flow from and relate to one's perceptive thoughts - they are also just as much interrelated, like the rainbow synthesis. One classical example is good, sound sleep.

It is such a prospect that forms the skin of our thought - it helps us to play the role of the observer, umpire and participant. It purports to balance and attention, as eyewitness and partaker, in states of distress and how well one is prepared to prevail over it with a goodnight's sleep, too.

Nidamboor is a wellness physician, independent researcher and author