rating keeps going down

I know I lose games, so?

Yeah, how?

If you play too much and play when you are in bad condition, perhaps tired, stressed, tilted.. you will play worse than you should and lose a lot. It happens to me sometimes where my desire to play is higher than my condition allows, I play a lot more than usual and lose a lot of rating, because I am more likely to play more than usual if I am performing worse as I can get desperate to put a loss behind me by replacing it with a better performance.

I would say don't play too much to preserve your energy, and if you play too much you won't be able to learn from each game so well. Focus on quality over quantity, it is better to play one game a day if you study that game and take lessons from it and apply study focused on what weaknesses you discover than it is to play lots of games and not to reflect on any of them.

Also - not all study is equal. Watching a lot of youtube videos can be zero help. Reading books but not studying them is not helpful. A book should not be read but studied, with notes, playing out the positions, not simply reading it like you would a novel.

Lastly I would give some extra advice - something that helped me - get an opening repetoire, you can decide your own based on opening books, lets say you will play french against e4, queens gambit declined against d4, and your opening for white can be the Scotch, for example. You focus your opening study on those openings, and if you notice you face a lot of X opening, you can add to your reppetoire by learning lines against that in more detail. This means you are improving your opening reppetoire over time and giving your games some structure. In theory you should learn more and more moves and lines over time and the longer you play the more opening theory you will acquire. You said you already do puzzles so I thought I'd share that, as it helped me. Of course don't neglect endgames too by studying endgame theory and practicing endgames with Chess.com's endgame drills.

Much of the game is pattern recognition. If you study and do puzzles and all that and still fall for two-movers, you may just not be good at pattern recognition.

I have checked a few games of yours. Here is a fairly typical example:

Here are a few key problems that I found:

1. Very bad time management. In the game above, you started with 15 minutes, and ended with 15:38. You used less time than the increment.

2. Careless moves (played too fast) that are obvious blunders. On move 7 you lost a queen, and later you just hung a rook for no reason. Again, playing too fast is the main culprit.

3. Very questionable resignation. The end position might lose or it might not. Let's find out by playing. Resigning is just horrible.

So, to recap:

Use your time and think.

Don't resign.

I think I can see the problem. You failed this puzzle https://www.chess.com/puzzles/problem/1105812

The average time spent on this puzzle is 35 seconds. You played the wrong move after only 10 seconds. The correct tactic is not hard to find, but you need to give yourself enough time to find it.

There were a bunch of games before that where I kept running out of time, so I tried to play faster.

I'm told to try new openings but I'm just not familiar with them and keep losing pieces.

As for playing fewer games, when I do that I make even more basic blunders than what you see in the history. I typically need to play dozens of games against the bots before I stop making the really basic blunders. I look through each piece on the board but I just don't see it.

It is all a matter of discipline. Slow down and think hard about what your opponent's next move could be.

This video by IM Bobula helped me. He also has a free 10 week email course. My rating went up about 100 points over those 10 weeks. None of it came easily but a lot of hard work did pay off.

Improving Your Chess - Resources for Beginners and Beyond...

https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell/improving-your-chess-resources-for-beginners-and-beyond

https://www.chess.com/blog/RussBell

First, you're doing the right thing with slow games and your puzzle rating is solid. It sounds obvious but I'm 1400 and I still fail to do this sometimes: look for checks, captures, and attacks. Agan, I'm sure that sounds extremely obvious, but even solely looking for checks (both yours and your opponents) can reveal unexpected wins. Below is a game I played where I considered a random check and realized it was Mate in 2.

In contrast, below I missed a check hanging a fork losing my Bishop, consequently panicked an tried to threaten the Knight, not realizing I was handing over my Queen:

Second, I notice that in the Two Knights Italian, you play 4. d3. Have you considered the Fried Liver Attack? Black has to know/find Na5, and I doubt anyone under 1000 knows that. Even if they play Na5, White is still slightly better:

As far as fried liver attacks go, my experience says that they don't work for players with a rating above 500 on here.

That's just useless advice.

However, losing pieces has nothing to do with openings. It has everything to do with you not using your time and playing too fast.

You could be right, but I think it's worth a try. I analyzed your games using OpeningTree and it looks like you only tried Ng5 7 times in 55 games against the Two Knights Italian. In all 7 of those games, your opponents fell into the trap. The average Elo of your opponents that fell into it was 769.

If you’re playing dozens of games every day then if you’re playing for improvement that’s too much. Try to go for quality over quantity. When you get ‘blindsided’ you need to focus on not just the position but cast your mind back to the thinking error that caused you to not see it and try to eventually build up your board awareness.

You have to fix your blundering basically. It’s impossible to get anywhere until you can see and anticipate one move threats.

There are always bumps in the road, and taking long breaks won't help that. I don't blame you at all, and the mindset of it might help too. Like "Oh yeah I won't win this game" or any other negative connotation. Which might make all the difference if you've studied and done a lot.

When my brain decides to work I surprise myself that I manage to win and play lots of good moves ... then the brain decides to fail for 5+ games in arow and thus my elo stays at 500

You say you play dozens of games every day and that you play long games. You also say you study and do puzzles.

This is practically impossible. There is not enough hours in a day, unless you are unemployed and do not sleep at all.

Anyway, cut down on the amount of games. A couple games a day, even just one, is enough.