TL;dr: we like denial play, but mood-killing everyday life bullshit often crosses our plans. How to deal with this?

My girlfriend and I both enjoy denial play. She likes giving me slow, teasing handjobs, ruining my orgasms or denying them altogether (and I quite like it, too!)

However, a lot of times, we find that real life kind of gets in the way of our plans.
We both have busy lives, and both our libidos react rather sensitive to stress, so our sex life is very irregular. Sometimes, when the stars align, we get down and dirty 3-4 times on a single weekend; other times, we enter a three-week period where basically nothing happens because we're both too stressed or tired to get in the mood.

Unfortunately, this makes it pretty hard to do some proper denial play.

For example, when she's ending a handjob without release and telling me "Heh, guess you'll have to wait till tomorrow 😘", a lot of times, some real life bullshit happens the next day and we don't get to continue our play.
For me, this quickly turns the fun, masochistic kind of frustration into a genuinely annoying kind of frustration. It's fun getting actively denied because she likes to make me suffer, but it's no fun getting denied because we've had a bad day at work and can't get in the mood.
For her, it sucks as well, because she feels bad for not following through on her promise. She likes leaving me hanging in a playful, teasing way, but she doesn't like making me genuinely frustrated.

Another example: sometimes when we do the deed and she wants to tease and deny me, she has a hard time getting me properly worked up and desperate, because I had already masturbated shortly before and am still in my refractory period.
Now obviously, I'd be happy to keep my hands off myself for a while if I knew that we would be having some fun soon, but again, due to the highly irregular pacing of our sex life, it's impossible for me to plan ahead. So, I masturbate every now and then. But it really sucks when we can't do a proper teasing session because I've taken the wind out of my own sail with a quick toilet wank during the previous night.

We have tried setting fixed schedules to work around this (e.g. "We're playing every saturday, no matter what", or "I'm going to tease you every evening for the next three days"), but we've both found that this takes the fun out of things and makes sex feel like a chore.

Sooo long story short, we're looking for low-stake ways to reliably incorporate denial play into our highly unreliable sex life. I can't imagine that we're the only couple struggling with this - anyone been in a similar situation and found a way for things to work?