Think of the loss as a form of payment. What it buys you is experience. So whenever you lose, ask yourself what experience that just bought you? What improvement does it allow you to bring into your future games?

If your mindset is to become a better player, rather than winning, then a loss is still a way to gain something. And long term, you'll win more games if you think this way

People will tell you to not care about losing or your rating, but that didn't work for me.

What worked for me is "the rating I care about is my rating in three months from now, not today", which gives space for learning from losses etc.

Because of how ELO works, your win-loss ratio will pretty quickly normalize to 50-50, regardless of how good you are.

Over time your increased rating will reflect increased skill, but even if your skill was doubled tomorrow, you would still hit a 50-50 W/L because you would be playing people at the same skill level.

However…if you want to feel better, play for a couple weeks and then challenge an occasional player. Once you obliterate them, you’ll feel better about the losses it took to get there. :)

I had a very strong coach work with me on this exact problem. He required me to reframe my definition of what it means to win. Basically it came down the the quality of effort I put into the game. If I put everything I have into a game and lose, it now feels like a win, because I know it will make me stronger. Conversely, if I don't give a good effort, but happen to win the game, I count that as a loss. This only applies to longer time control games. I still play blitz now and then for light fun.

For me the biggest blocker was over-focusing on the numbers going up and down. On lichess you can make all ratings invisible (bottom of the preferences page, "Show player ratings"). This means you can't see your own rating or your opponent's. Your opponent can obviously still see both if he or she doesn't have this option enabled.

Make a list of the reasons you get angry, and re-write and filter down to the top two. Write those somewhere and look at it regularly. You'd be amazed at how useful subconscious insights will filter up into consciousness this way.

A couple of points:

* Every time you win, someone else must loose. You should be happy to make the same sacrifice.

* If you loose half your games, you are playing at your appropriate skill level. If you play consistently you will inevitably reach that point.

I'm a Lichess puzzle player. I find it more entertaining than a full game, and can fit a puzzle or two anytime rather than a match (even a bullet game is too draining for a quick time-filler)

You don't learn anything with a win. You learn a lot with a loss.

A world in which only you win chess games would be pretty boring. Just sort of work backwards from that perspective.