New MacBook Air M2 16/256 very slow with encryption on

I chose to enable encryption which I thought might impact system performance but I'm only doing text editing and viewing photos or small videos of 20 sec to 4 min. Even booting up is slow, it's like having an old Bios machine. Sometimes videos don't even play, or the initiate in low res.

I ran some benchmark tests and they are inline with expectations ??

the encryption according to apple is done at hardware level and should not impact performance.

I only have 40 gig used on the 256 gig available.

I see there are some posts on here referring to issues that arose after the last OS update, but I'm not aware if that is still relevant.

is it normal for MacBook air to be really this sluggish??

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