I was literally sitting here drinking a coffee as I read that haha. Maybe I’ll switch to decaf 
I found the chronic stress thing very difficult to overcome but looking back the biggest issue is that when you already feel stressed, exhausted etc to the point of being ill - feeling good feels very far away and you can easily find many many reasons feeling good isn’t possible.
In other words, the condition itself becomes an existential threat - something to stress about in and of itself - and provides endless runway for never finding a way to feel good.
Indeed from a real world perspective the effects are severe - I had them over the course of years - and very much took a toll on my health. Now that I’m over the hump I’m starting to look and feel healthy again.
I imagine that states like depression work in a pretty similar way - concretising themselves in your own mind as (what appears to be) an impermeable/indestructible structure - reflecting itself in your own physiology and projecting itself onto your the world around you.
A state like chronic stress “feels” concrete, but it isn’t - and it doesn’t take as much to dissolve it as you might tell yourself. Advice like getting massage and taking it easy is still good and sensible, but it can also endorse the idea that you need to accommodate the stressor within - rather than you needing to be the one way to feel good.
One thing I think now is that if I want to be actually free, it follows that I wouldn’t choose to put myself in high pressure situations again and again - that I would not want to be a slave to work, or overestimate the value of money etc etc. Whereas before I indeed I had the attitude that “I need to use actualism to get over the chronic stress” without reducing my workload or attending to my needs or making sensible decisions. That was a clue into a key aspect of my identity that was actually causing a lot of stress - the high achiever, the invulnerable perfectionist, the status seeker.
If you do ever feel particularly stuck, particularly ill or just past the point of return - I find this a great opportunity to “switch” into a totally different emotional state (feeling good). It still happens to me and I still do this. If things are going so so, you might not really notice, but if things are going terribly, it feels, then this is a great big red warning light for you to completely change your strategy. From that point of view you could look at the chronic stress as a helper, pointing you in the right direction.
I think it’s quite common to slip from an unnoticed “so so” state to a worse state - it’s quite natural in fact because it’s just a more developed version of feeling so so. That’s why it’s much better to catch it early and really develop the familiarity within a substantial feeling good. That’s what I’m working on at the moment.