You lose a game you should have won. You queue up another one immediately, still annoyed, and play worse than you normally would. You lose that one too. Now you are really annoyed, so you play a third, and it goes even worse. This is tilt, and if it has happened to you, it is not a discipline failure. It is a predictable response to frustration that happens to almost everyone, at every level.
Rating makes it worse, not better
Part of what fuels tilt is watching a single number react instantly to every result. A loss does not just feel bad, it visibly costs you points in real time, which adds urgency to win-the-next-one-back energy that leads directly into more bad decisions. The rating number is doing exactly what it is designed to do, and that design happens to be well suited to spiraling.
It also does not help that rating is genuinely noisy. A single game can swing on one lucky or unlucky moment that has nothing to do with your actual skill level that day, so chasing it game by game means reacting to noise as if it were signal.
A different number to watch
The most reliable way out is not willpower, it is changing what you are measuring in the moment. Instead of watching a rating number swing after every game, some players do better tracking something steadier: how many of their known recurring mistakes showed up again this session, and how many did not. That is a slower-moving, more honest signal, and it is much harder to tilt over, because it does not punish you for a single unlucky result.
This is a big part of why Rookie's deck leads with weaknesses cured instead of a rating graph. A bad session can still be a good one, if the mistake you have been working on did not show up. That is real progress, even on a day the scoreboard says otherwise.
If tilt has been costing you rating, try shifting what you look at after a loss: not "did I win," but "did I make the mistake I am working on." Rookie's deck tracks that for you automatically once you sign up.