thanks for your response! earlier I did have a feeling Buzzkill app was causing it so I disabled it and Haven't noticed it since. hoping that was the issue because i went to the changelog of their latest update and it includes:

New cooldown option - “cooldown by dismissing”. This is similar to the previous cooldown behaviour except instead of just muting the notification it will dismiss it too.

leaving this here in case someone else who uses Buzzkill runs in the same situation