I'm definitely more on the inward/sad/self-blaming side when it comes to tilting. I tend to be very improvement-oriented while I'm playing (one of these days I will break my lifetime streak of always being the weakest player in all my gaming circles aaaaaaaaa), and that leads me to focus pretty exclusively on what I'm doing wrong rather than what other players are doing. Most of the time it's productive; I can focus on those things very logically as problems to solve and it's so rewarding when it pays off. As long as I keep my focus on correcting my actions instead of correcting something that's innately wrong or broken about myself, I'm fine. But the self-doubt/frustration still finds its way in. Probably the primary trigger for it when I'm playing alone is watching myself make the same mistake multiple times in a row. My inner critic can be vicious and doesn't have a whole lot of patience for my own nonsense. The second most likely trigger is getting into one too many situations where I feel helpless, like sometimes those long drawn out games where you're just fighting tooth and nail (beak and tentacle?) just to barely stop the other team from KOing and it feels like nothing that you're trying is working and you can't even find time to take a breath and make a plan because they're throwing bombs and strikes at your spawn. While cognitively I know that it's just a flaw of matchmaking, I guess when my lizard brain feels constantly under attack it reacts regardless of circumstance.
At that point there's two things I can try. If I'm not too far gone I can usually sway control back over to my left brain by re-focusing on what tangible changes I can look to make. Usually pausing to go over replays helps with this because luring my brain back into analytical mode shifts focus away from self-blame and gives me something to work with; that helps nullify the helpless feelings a lot.
Sometimes though I'm just too destabilized to rally myself though and at that point I just have to stop and go listen to angsty music and vent-journal and do whatever the pity-party calls for just to get it out of my system. What's critical, I find, is that I actually make an active effort to do this and not just take a break and try to ignore it. I figure it's like if you ignore or chastise a kid for crying about being scared/anxious they're not going to stop being scared/anxious (they might eventually quiet down but they'll internalize the trauma which is like, worse). So on some level it's like I kind of need to just sit down with my inner child and talk about what's going on and why we're sad and let us be sad until things don't feel as raw anymore. That's the most effective way I've found to deal with it. When I don't take time to do this I feel like the sad/frustrated feelings can just linger and in the worst cases I can stay on edge for days or weeks at a time where it doesn't take much going wrong for me to rapidly devolve into a mess (and even though I know this I still don't always do it because I feel like there's just never enough time but I usually just end up wasting more time being sad if I don't, agh).
Anyway, at least when I'm playing in a group it's different, because while my self-consciousness/self-doubt is magnified x10 (x100 if other people in the group are audibly unhappy but at least that's relatively uncommon), it also takes a lot more of it before it starts to bother me. I think a large part of it is just that when I'm focused on interacting with others I'm less in my own head and my emotions don't have any time to really spiral in on themselves; I can shake them off more easily. That's not to say spiraling doesn't happen, but I'm more armored against it in general. Sometimes, especially during high-stress sessions or playing sets with stakes, I'll experience a sort of delayed effect where I don't feel any self-judgement/frustration about how poorly I did until long after the play session. (I guess this is the same thing that happens in any sort of crisis situation that requires immediate attention; I'm too busy dealing with the situation to have any feelings about it until after it's over, hah). So at least that's kind of convenient, and means I can generally play a lot longer in a single stretch with a group than I can play alone, provided the vibes are good.
).
