As to the mental game, what do you think of the idea that some players and writers who seem to have little appreciation of the significance of the mental game, lack insight on this because of their extremely rigid, mathematical, and unemotional approach to the game. So when they sit, most all of the emotional factors that tilt many millions of players are already ironed out of their game via this approach, thus making them blind to the subject.

This is good stuff keruli, this can definitely help you bring more awareness to your mind patterns.

I won't bother you with my past but from reading your first post I kind of resonate with you. But long story short, I too had a rough relationship with poker. There were only short bursts of time where I found myself enjoying the game and 80% of my career felt like a grind. I too am still working on it but the momentum has shifted for me and I'm starting to be much more indifferent about mistakes and results.

The mind is an amazing tool and if used properly will help you reach your goals, if used improperly will be dragging you down.

Good luck and will be following your progress

That's a complex topic and I'm not sure I understand what you're saying or asking.

Some players who lack that insight also just don't really need it, right? (due to their strategy and personality being sufficiently machine-like)
And they don't need to iron those emotional factors out of their game, as those factors simply don't arise to a sufficient extent.

But regardless of why: If they do lack that domain of insight, then they must be flawed as coaches, mentors etc., I suppose.

yesterday first session since rock-trip and getting a cold.
900 hands in 2 hours at the lower stake.
uneventful, relaxed - good considering slight anxiety prior to session due to low volume + break.

yesterday night, very tired from cold+coming back from visiting a friend, played about 800 hands in 2 hours.

- Had some challenging hands where I went with an only-weak feeling that my line would work/made sense - both times (maybe too lightly) making a big bluff that my opponent called easily
- When I'm very tired it's important that I play careful/nitty/basic lines to avoid what otherwise happens, namely what one could call half-conscious auto-spews: Big spewy lines that my more alert brain would ring alarm bells to stop me from doing and/or would more carefully check that the line makes sense.
...slightly worrying that I didn't completely avoid that.
- I did stay calm though and wasn't tilted by this. Overall feeling stayed fine despite being slightly too tired to feel good.

short 500 hand session, felt fairly good.
- I was playing just the lower limit to see how I feel today, but somehow I'm not getting round to playing any more than that. Too much time spent on cooking and other stuff, and I need to get up early tomorrow, so probably should only play very briefly now if at all...
I mention this because one of my biggest pitfalls has always been starting sessions when I'm not sure whether I should be playing, with any tilt during that session then being amplified by regret over even having played that session.

Did end up playing a session later yesterday.
Just 500 hands, and maybe I struggled to adjust to things going badly. There were a couple of big, unfortunate hands where It seemed that I could have thought more clearly about the situation and either just found a fold or at least folded a higher %. In one of the hands, in addition to failing to find a possible fold when my hand's equity tanked on a board-change, my opponent turned out to be using a seemingly brainless 'level 1' line and I caught myself angrily typing a derogatory note...

1k hands session last night at higher limit.

- after a meh hand with a foggy mind that resulted in getting 'owned' I berated my opponent in chat re. whether they could even read the board. embarrassing.

- starting to get slightly worried. Maybe my approach is too simplistic or abstract and I need to be putting in more effort to engage mentally during play.

- where is the boundary between mental game, focus and playing hands well?
Maybe one distinction is between a) quality of focus/thought during a decision and b) emotional response

I have a bullet list of some bad habits and one is "internal and external grumbling over variance". I find that when the internal grumbling becomes external I've clearly reached a point where my emotions are starting to have a negative impact on my decisions. Berating an opponent in chat definitely falls into that category, of course. Question is what do you do about it mid-session? Do you quit? Do you reset? Do you just accept that emotion is part of poker, etc., own it and soldier on?

900 hands at lower stake, easy and uneventful

Last night played another session, 2 hours at the lower limit and low number of tables.

Somehow became a relatively bad session though.
the two main factors I recall:

- general theme of noticing some doubts about my overall game

- being unsettled by a specific reg who I was clashing against during that session: Firstly I was uncertain whether they were a bad/passive nit-reg or actually a more thinking, flexible type. Several tricky hands vs them.

This culminated in a hand vs that player where I certainly could have found a fold, where their play again didn't quite fit my mental picture of them, and where at the crucial point in the hand my thought process kind of broke down, with me having a vague feeling that I was beat, not clearly picturing hands that would take the line, whilst also being unsure what my own hand's qualities were in that river spot and how I should react...
After calling I briefly felt tilt physically, that kind of slight heat rising into the head. Fortunately I was already considering ending the session, so it felt fine to just blind out there - and the tilt didn't build.

short session, uneventful

failed to post about quite a big session on friday - real life stuff in the evening and all day yesterday.

1.5k hands in three and a half hours. Several hands where, in hind-sight, I was a bit disappointed that I lost the maximum - Maybe I could have tried harder to play the hand more carefully. Maybe I should have managed the final decision slightly better.
negatively to variance and could have
At least I didn't feel any tilt accumulating. I did feel that I had responded badly to variance - could have saved money and energy simply by weathering the variance a bit better.

long session last night: 2.7k hands in 5 hours.

In a context of a building feeling of dissatisfaction with my game - how imprecise, neutral and lacking in clear general tactics it has recently been, this session I felt slightly drawn in to a more aggressive approach. Getting more into the thick of things, a longer battle, collecting a lot of impressions, more actively looking for spaces for key strategies that I could more purposely build my game around.

A couple of hands briefly irritated me, maybe because my opponent's strategy was blindingly simple, but i quickly recovered each time and was able to maintain ok focus until the end of the session when I blinded out for a break and suddenly felt that I didn't want to play on.

One hand at the same time irritated me due to not having been able to read it correctly and my opponent clearly playing it quite well, which is always worrying when playing at a level where I need all my opponents to be bad, whilst also encouraging me when I realised that my opponent had used a tactic that I had often used in the past - a strong tactic that I could definitely add to my game if I wanted.