Kali is incredibly SLOW

I have been using Kali with VirtualBox all year, no issues at all.

Just this week, Kali has been super slow. (I know running a virtual box will be slower than regular box, but that is not the case.)

For instance, it use to take maybe 3-5 minutes to boot. Now it takes ~10.

Once I reach my desktop, it takes another 3 or so minutes for the icons to appear.

When I click to open FireFox, it takes around 3 minutes for it to open/load.

When I'm in terminal and call "msfconsole" it use to take maybe 1-2 minutes to load, it is now taking close to 10 minutes to load.

Literally everything is incredibly slow now, and I'm not sure how to fix it.

I'm using the latest version of Kali from OffSec with the latest version of VirtualBox.

Out of my host's 16Gb of RAM, I've allotted 4Gb to the VM and am using 2 processors. This has been my setup since the beginning and I use to not have any issues.

The only thing I can think of is earlier this week i did "apt update && apt upgrade".

Does anyone have any ideas how to speed things back up again??? I've been searching and can't find anything. Just tons of people saying "running a virtual machine will be slower, etc" I know this already, but it is not my problem. Out of nowhere, everything has become unreasonably slow.

Any help would be appreciated!