If your body never gets to turn off its stress response, stress might start feeling different for you — which means you might not feel like you're stressed. At least not in the same way.
We often think of stress symptoms involving activation: fighting or running. But stress that sticks around can start to exhaust your body and lead to:
tiredness
tension pain
an inability to focus
a lower sex drive
depression
If you have other health conditions, your symptoms of these conditions may worsen. So you may not "feel" stressed because you're too distracted with managing your other symptoms.
Some people even develop a fawn response to stress. Like the fright response, the fawn response confronts the stressor — but with appeasement instead. Think: Giving in to demands to end a siege of pressure.