Playback freezing

For years, I've been having this issue with After Effects whereas seemingly randomly in the middle of using it, the playback will stop working. 

What happens is, I will click play and the video will not play and then if I attempt to click anywhere on the screen, I will get the spinning wheel for 5-10 seconds and then the video will stop attempting to play and it seems like it's back to normal, however, once this has happened once, it happens every single time that I attempt to press play until I restart the application. 

I've been having this issue since at least 2019 and I've tried everything I can think of to get rid of it including reinstalling After Effects, clearing cache regularly and I've never been able to find anyone else having a similar problem to me.

It used to be more managable as it would come and go - e.g. I would have a lot of issues with it on one particular project and then it wouldn't happen for months - but for the past couple of months it's been happening with every single project I do and I end up having to restart the application at least 10 times even if I'm only working on a project for 2-3 hours.

Does anyone have any advice on how to solve this? I've attached a picture the specs of my Mac, but let me know if there's anything else that would be good to know.