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I've experienced periods of stress illness over the last seven years. (To me, stress illness is a body of psychosomatic issues that we tend to give finer-grained diagnoses, like "chronic pain" or "anxiety disorder.")
The most effective approaches I've found to treating it involve training yourself to remove the fear of the symptoms, since the symptoms themselves are fuelled by fear.
These approaches essentially all train you to become, at worst, indifferent to the suffering these symptoms cause. Indifference can sound like a passive mode —a sort of "who cares?" said once in the general direction of the problem and then forgotten—but stress illness doesn't work this way. It asserts itself through sensations such as panic and pain, through spinning loops of worried thoughts, through major disruptions to your sense of equilibrium.
Indifference thus becomes an active process. Here are some of the techniques I've found most helpful.
Very popular, largely involves observing your thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations from a distance. I find this nominally helpful in acute situations, but good as a "maintenance" practice.
Coined by (I believe) Alan Gordon this involves observing your symptoms with curiosity when they are low, and using avoidance behaviours and trying to create a sense of internal safety when they are high. The idea is to encourage your brain to stop seeing the pain itself as a threat, which breaks the pain/fear cycle. I found this extremely effective when experiencing chronic pain a few years ago, and I use it often during flare-ups of stress illness in general.
This is a psychotherapy technique in which you learn to observe your thoughts, feelings, and sensations as emerging from different "parts" of yourself. It's hard to briefly explain, but there are good IFS resources on the web if you are curious. Sometimes this is hard to access for me, but it often works, and works extremely well.
A response designed for panic/anxiety, it involves quickly (D)efusing an initial fear, (A)ccepting the fear/thought/sensation, (R)unning towards it (getting excited about it) if you can't easily dispel your fear of the thing, and then (E)ngaging in some activity that will occupy your mind so that you don't brood over the situation. Recently, I've found a much older resource ("Hope and Help for your Nerves") that describes a very similar approach in what I find to be a more helpful way.
As you can see, there is a lot here. It's taken me years to become competent with just these few things. However, they all help get me to a place where I can be indifferent, accepting, or even relate to suffering in a friendly way.
Hopefully this helps describe how indifference can be a very active process. It can be so active, in fact, that the labour of cultivating all these habits it can become a stressor all on its own. Sometimes I just have to be OK with just letting myself be shitty for a while.
While I'm going through a relapse right now, I've used these techniques to get back to places where I feel very healthy and can enjoy my life. I'm moving through the stages much more quickly than usual this time, but I'm also using the aid of medication for the first time as well, which has been breeding its own concerns. Which, of course, I must find ways of becoming indifferent to :)