Dr Dre Contract difficulty

I’ve been doing like 2-3 dr dre contracts daily for the last few days, but all of a sudden, today, when I play the final mission for each leak, I have 0 lives (when I used to have 1) and enemies are bullet sponges. I don’t see any option to change the difficulty at all and I don’t know why know the missions start in hard mode. Anyone knows how to change it?