Experiencing some bugs/hiccups with my 1.5 year old installation of Mint 21.1 Vera. Any suggestions on what to do next?

Lately I've noticed a lot of bugs with my instalation of 21.1 Vera. Up till now, it has worked flawlessly, really a great linux distro. I plan to continue using Mint.

However, recently (as in, the past month or so) it's started to get really buggy.

I am consistent with running update && upgrade.

But for some reason, apps are crashing quite often now. Specificaly, Firefox is crashing a lot. VirtualBox stopped working. Sometimes the D.E. kind of crashes (I'm running cinnamon). Upong restart, sometimes the D.E. will appear to look kinda janky and an error message says that it is running in safe-mode, or something like that.

Should I consider updating the kernel to the newest version? Is that what is causing these issues potentially?

I have 64GB Ram, decent sized SDD for the OS, so I don't think hardware is the issue.

Any advice would be much appreciated! Thanks