How do I genuinely improve?

Hey everybody! I’m new to chess and would like genuine advice on how to improve.

I’ll explain a my story so far for some needed context. It’s a little long, but I promise it’s somewhat entertaining.

I started playing chess May 2025, but I only played a few online games due to some performance anxiety playing real people lol.

So I stuck to puzzles, not really trying to get better, but more for some fun brain exercises through out the day. I guess my puzzles were a little glitched out because I was getting only mate in 1s the entire time and managed to rise to a puzzle rating of 3000 with 1 or 2 points at a time. So, with that math I spent thousands of puzzles not learning anything thinking I was incredible at chess…until it leveled out. I dropped to 1400 after the puzzle revamp that happened recently.

I decided that I want to start playing real people and manage to have about an 80% win rate at the 400 elo range, after some practice and looking into openings, which gave me the same love for the game that puzzles did in the beginning.

With my 80% win rate, I managed to climb to 880 elo fairly easily. Until the reckoning…I stayed up until 6:30 am a few nights ago playing games and losing terribly. I somehow managed to drop my win rate to 50% in a single night and my elo to 725 ish.

That’s when I realized I don’t actually know how to get better from here. My pure intuition of making moves based on opening principles isn’t enough to cut it anymore.

I know I’m playing hope chess, so I’ve started doing puzzles again and forcing myself to not make a move until I calculate all the necessary lines.

Any other advice will be greatly appreciated!