Why is it so hard to walk away when losing? Any tips?

Hey everyone,I have a major leaks in my mental game.
Whenever I start to lose, I find it almost impossible to stop playing.
I keep telling myself I can win it back, but usually, I just end up losing even more.
Why does our brain do this? Does anyone have good tips or rules they use to force themselves to quit a bad session?Thanks!

Try setting up some rules in advance like a stop loss for cash games, playing time limit or maximum number of tournaments per day.

It is a human trait to convince yourself to get back to even. It is precisely why gambling is so addictive. When you lose, your brain triggers a stress response, which impairs your logic and risk assessment (this is what we refer to as "tilt").

What you have to train yourself to do is think about poker as a series of decisions, not outcomes. If you focus on consistently making correct decisions, the good outcomes will take care of themselves in the long run. If you only focus on the outcomes, the moment you have a hand go against you, your logic for every subsequent hand will be impaired.

In poker, the chips you lose don't have a memory. They don't know they used to belong to you, and the deck doesn't "owe" you a winning session to balance things out. Every hand is a completely independent event.

Recognizing these mental traps as biological wiring makes it a lot easier to spot them happening in real-time. The best players aren't immune to these feelings; they've just trained themselves to recognize the biological alarm bells and force themselves to close the software or stand up from the table.