Premiere freezes my macbook randomly all of a sudden for the past few weeks

For the past week or so, every time I am using Premiere Pro it randomly freezes. My mouse is visible and moves but nothing can be clicked and not just Premiere but the entire computer becomes unresponsive to anything so I have to force shutdown and restart.

I'm not a 100% sure because I always work from an external hard drive but I worked on a small project directly off my macbook and it hasn't froze thus far when I work that way.  Again, the frequency and the time I spend working from my computer's hard drive is little so I can't say it is definitely an issue with external hard drives, or quite possibly the exact hard drive I am using now (although the problem only started recently).

I have been using Premiere Pro for over 5 years on several different macs and macbooks and always worked off an external hard drive (various brands) and never had this happen. I haven't had any issues with my current setup at all until the past 1~2 weeks.

There isn't any specific action I am doing that causes this, it just happens randomly. If I'm working on a project for over an hour it almost always happens. Only things that seems consistent is that if I restart my computer and open Premiere again right after the freeze, Premiere seems to freeze a few minutes into the session

Around the same time I also noticed Premiere sometimes doesn't render simple scaling effects properly which is also a new issue for me. Generall more buggy than I'm used to.

I have a lot of important projects and this has been driving me nuts for the past week or so. Any help or insight would be appreciated, thank you!

My macbook specs:

macOS: Ventura 13.0.1

Processor: 2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9

Graphics: Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB

Memory: 64 GB 2667 MHz DDR4

External Hard Drive: Glyph Blackbox Plus