Dr Amina Aitsi-Selmi MD PhD

Overwhelm is one of the psychological markers of our time. Not stress. Not busyness. Overwhelm — the feeling of being buried under demands. It comes from the Middle English “whelmen” meaning to turn upside down or submerge. Most people respond by trying harder. Working longer. Pushing through. Meanwhile, your family, relationships, and health pay the cost while you fall deeper into the fantasy of a better future that never comes. This is how we treat ourselves and our planet.

Recently, I’ve been struck by how much misunderstanding arises in leadership and communication because of a lack of clarity about empathy. Most self-aware leaders would consider empathy a positive attribute, albeit in moderation. Many work overtime from guilty feelings when others are disappointed. Yet excessive empathy raises fears of lacking objectivity and compromised decision-making - after all, leadership entails hard choices, and you can’t satisfy everyone all the time

I was in a relational leadership session and made a light comment about “snail energy” to describe how I was feeling. I thought we’d move on, but the whole group began to resonate. Something softened. People felt more alive. When we use animal metaphors for humans, we often refer to more powerful species: we feel ourself ‘soar like an eagle’ or be ‘strong like a lion’ to face the ‘wolf in the boardroom’ and so on. But this time, it was the snail - a distant relative of ours