MacBook Air (M1, 2020) experiencing frequent memory warnings due to high usage by contextstored and powerd processes

I am getting several times a day a memory warning requiring me to force quit all applications on my MacBook Air (M1, 2020 - 8GB RAM). I have looked at Activity Monitor and there are two processed used by root using respectively 20gb and 9gb - it is the same two processes each time. The 20gb culprit is contextstored and the 9gb is powerd. This started three days ago. The only changes before that were: (a) I started using MS Outlook on my Mac and (b) I updated to MacOS Tahoe 26.0.1 (25A362).

This is very debilitating for my work as l keep having to force quite everything and re-start (have shut down on a couple of occasions, then restarted, but that has not fixed it).

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Application memory warnings