It's too easy what should I do?

So I played G2 when it came out and absolutely loved it despite the bugs (pun not intended) and I recently found out G1 was on game pass. I did most of the lower yard in clover armour (including killing wolf spiders) because I never felt the need to upgrade. I've just killed the mant but I'm quite disappointed. I did it in the scuba hat thing, ladybug chest piece, aphid slippers and the mint mace because the rest of my ladybug gear was broken, and yet I used one bandage for the whole fight. A similar thing happened with the assistant manager where I only used a cereal bar after the little robots snuck up on me. I feel like I should increase the difficulty from medium to woah but I don't want it to just inflate the health bars so every fight takes ages like when I first got to the upper yard. I never had this problem in G2 because the challenging bugs were hard because of how quickly they could kill you, not how slowly you could kill it. Another thing I could do is speed run to Ng+ because that's meant to be harder but I don't really understand it.

That's my little rant over any help/ideas are appreciated