Premiere slowing down immensely as soon as I add audio clips

When I add my audio voice over clips to my project, my entire Premiere Pro starts lagging an INSANE amount. Basically, once the audio clips are in the project, anytime I make any edits WHATSOEVER to the timeline, Premiere will freeze up for about 10 seconds. So for example, if I need to move a clip forward or backward (even by a single frame) my Premiere will freeze for about 10 seconds afterward. You can imagine how this is slowing down my editing process by quite a bit.

I am a full time YouTuber and I've been making videos on Premiere for years. I haven't changed anything about my process, this issue just randomly popped up a week or two ago. The first time I had this problem I was able to get around it by making another sequence, only moving a select few audio clips into it, and then do all of my editing there. Once all the clips had been edited the way I wanted them to, I would move them back to the main sequence. This helped me get that video done, but I would prefer to not have to do this.

I was hoping that when I started working on a completely new video, the problem wouldn't persist, but it did. I can't keep working this way, there must be some way to fix this issue. With this problem, it's taking me about 5 times longer than it normally would to make a video.

I have already tried all of the basic things that I've found across the internet. Clearing all my caches, moving to a new sequence, creating a new project, resetting all of my Premiere preferences, setting my audio input to none, uninstalling and reinstalling Premiere etc.

The audio file I'm dealing with is a big one. It's about an hour long, and has been chopped up to remove all of the silent bits so I can just go through and keep the parts I need. It's a long audio clip, but like I said before, I've been making videos like this for years and never ran into this problem. I've dealt with audio clips much longer than this one, and didn't have this problem. 

I am open to ANY AND ALL suggestions that could possibly fix this issue. Thanks!