Depends on the champ u playing.
Want to play towards your strengths, and power spikes. Do you have better sustained damage? Better range adv? Can you set up ganks wells with your cc? Etc..
Generally it's not ideal being pushed in 24/7 as you generally lose priority. This can lead to shallower vision and less priority on roams and give them opportunities to set up dives.
For example.
I play a ton of losing matchup with veigardaddy. E.g., zed, fizz, lb, kass.
Wave management and mana (u can think of your mana as an hp bar as well, is the mana you are using for poke meaningful? Or is it detracting from your goal in lane) are key in these matchup.
You can set up situations in which you feel safer
1) playing under turret range where u can negate gap closers and focus on dodging skillshots. You want to be setting up areas where u can free farm or chunk effectively.
2 ) building up slow pushes. Gives you additional safety as minions will help in damaging (this can be done in alot of different ways)
a) keeping 1 minion adv

poking within enemy minions forcing aggro on you (can be good if you want to push waves while not autoing or using your spells on waves, however minion damage early is meaningful)
c)
3) pink wards to set up jungle ganks.
4) run some defensive setup so you can play more aggro. (E.g. seekers early, corrupting potion dark seal, time warp + biscuit, mercs vs double ap jungle mid resolve tree etc.)
There's a bit of matchup specific knowledge that I can show you regarding yasuo if that specifically was your problem though
This post was edited by potentate on Jan 22 2020 01:31pm