Delulu: discover the movement to romanticize life – 03/17/2024 – Balance

“100% obsessed with me”, “romanticize your life”, “pretend it until you believe it”. These are some of the phrases that circulate in videos about what it’s like to be “delulu”. The term comes from the word delusional (delusional, in Portuguese) and means adhering to an optimistic mentality.

The objective is to function as a kind of law of attraction, in which when you think positive things, you attract good things.

It’s like mind training in which the person produces a certain type of thought and does not allow random ideas to invade their consciousness, explains Karen Vogel, psychologist and professor at The School of Life, a global reference organization in the development and application of self knowledge.

According to Google Trends, in the last 12 months, search interest in the term delulu has grown around the world. In 2023, searches for this topic grew 20 times compared to the previous year.

Delulu is common in fan communities, such as in K-pop, a musical style from South Korea, where fans use the term to describe when their love for the artist goes beyond the limits of reality and becomes fantasy, like believing that they will fall apart. marry the singer or date him.

However, delulu burst that bubble and made it to TikTok. Sales manager and content creator Jasmine Cowell, 30, for example, shared on social media her experience of being “deluced with ideas.”

“From the moment you are so disillusioned to the point of believing that nothing will shake your life and that you will achieve anything you imagine, any external noise that goes against that idea, you simply don’t listen”, says Jasmine in a video published on the platform.

She says she uses this mentality in her work, like when she talks about budgets. “I set the value according to the market, but before there was that voice in my head saying: ‘no one is going to pay you that amount’. Thinking about delulu, I say, I can do it”, says Jasmine.

For her, the idea of ​​being a delulu is not to place any limitations on her life. “If it’s not in my control or if it doesn’t happen, it’s okay. I’m not going to dwell on what didn’t work out,” she says.

History student Dulce Barcelos, 22, is also part of this movement. “I went for a job interview and I didn’t pass. I couldn’t do it because something better was going to happen or because if I insisted on it, my life would take a different direction. That’s the way to react to things in a positive way. Imagining that better things are to come”, says Dulce when explaining how she applies the delulu mentality in her routine.

The young woman states that she suffered a lot when things didn’t go as planned, but observed that after a while, something much better happened and it only happened because that first thing went wrong. “That’s when I realized that sometimes it’s not the best option to suffer when things get out of our control,” says Dulce.

Furthermore, she states that romanticizing her life is interconnected with delulu thinking. “It involves being present in the moment. So, I’m going to drink my coffee calmly, I’m going to arrange my pretty plate, take a photo, experience that moment”, says Dulce.

Despite this, Dulce states that she is careful not to fall into the trap of toxic positivity, in which she ends up repressing feelings considered bad, such as sadness or anger, and states that there are realities that cannot be romanticized.

“I remember a comment on my video that really struck me. The girl said: ‘How can I romanticize my life if I wake up at five in the morning, I’m a single mother, I have two children and I work all day?’ We need to think about this too”, says Dulce.

Psychologist Mariângela Savoia warns that when adopting delulu thinking it is dangerous to pretend that everything is fine and not accept that we can have bad feelings. “It’s part of life to feel negative things and you need to learn to regulate your emotions instead of denying them.”

For Vogel, learning from frustrations is what helps us to deal better with certain situations. “If I’m creating a parallel reality where this doesn’t exist, I’m creating an unreality and living in a fairy tale,” says the psychologist.

Vogel states that it is necessary to understand why people adhere to the delulu mentality and ask themselves: is there something in my life that I don’t want to see?

“Not as a criticism, but to understand if she is not avoiding her reality. Is her reality so bad that she needs to pretend something different?”, says Vogel.

Savoia states that it is not enough to just think that things will work out or expect that this will happen, it is necessary to act.

“When things go right, you might think it was because of the strength of your thinking. It wasn’t, it was your actions that got you there. Thinking alone doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s only your actions that get you there. achieve certain objectives”, says Savoia.