When I learned about lucid dreaming in my 20s, I spent an inordinate amount of time (every day for years) developing the skill, including journaling — in as much detail as possible — my dream as soon as I woke up. Unfortunately, I cannot turn off the ability now and now have to deal with the consequence of recalling all my dreams: good and bad.
It's hard to describe exactly what was so unpleasant about it for me, but there's some element of time perception involved...it was as though my memories of dreams were encoded on the same track as my waking memories, and my days were missing the "pause between songs" so to speak.
Thankfully, at least for me, this is an effect that goes away quickly after I stop keeping a dream journal. I have had a similar effect when stressed/overworked, though, where I start dreaming in code. That's terrible.
After such a dream, when I wake up, I really feel like "damn, I should have found the best move and shown them!" but also like my brain is burned out from thinking so much and visualizing so much in my mind. Not restful.
But fortunately I have better dreams as well and sometimes, when I feel lonely, my brain turns on self-healing mode or something and I dream of someone I love. I will gladly take all the exhausting dreams, to keep the good ones.
Like you, this has always happened to me when I have been stressed and overworked, usually if I've spent a whole day rushing to get something completed that is a little difficult and I haven't appropriately broken down a problem into manageable chunks.
I especially like that I can identify a dream as the cause if I wake up in a weird mood. I worry that if I didn't have this recall, I might wake up just being vaguely pissed at my husband (because he was being a jerk in a dream).