problems with ram previews/performance

I've had my M1 MacBook Pro (13-in, 2020)  for about seven months now. It only has 8GB of RAM and i've never had perfomance issues or constant message errors like cached preview must have two or more frames in a project until recently. My work area was the entire comp. ( My comps are normally less than 30 secs).  

Now, I can't even have safari/chrome open while I work on a project and it's really bothering me. I can barely play and mess around with an audio track without an error message popping up. I've surrendered just about all of my RAM to AE, I've purged and purged. I even looked at my Activity Monitor to watch for spikes in CPU and I'm still having issues.

Is there any possible ways I could fix this? Or do I just simply have the wrong specs in my computer?