SpinningBall Editing OnMacbookPro

I wonder if anyone can help. 

Premiere keeps pausing and becomes unresponsive for 10-40 seconds. This is accompanied by apples spinning wheel. It's mostly happening when I use essential sound motion. Sometimes when this happens the timeline is also playing and continues to play until the spinning wheel stops. 

I have some really tight deadlines at the moment and this is adding so much time to simple tasks. I've tried deleting cookies, reinstalling premire and resetting preferences....

It's happening on a number of different projects. 

Any help would be hugely appreciated. 

Thanks,

Ian