how do you free up RAM on a mac

Worth checking the swap number at the bottom of Activity Monitor's Memory tab. A few GB of swap is fine. If it's in the double digits every day, that's the sign 8GB really is too small for your workload, and no tweak fixes that.

Yellow on an 8gb Air with that combo is pretty normal tbh. macOS uses compressed memory and swap, yellow just means it's doing that. Red is when you'll actually feel it. Things that help: - run Slack in a Chrome tab instead of the desktop app, the app is basically a second browser - turn on Memory Saver in Chrome settings > Performance, it puts background tabs to sleep - in Activity Monitor sort the Memory tab by size, sometimes one tab or extension is eating 1-2gb on its own - restart now and then if you never shut the lid properly Skip the RAM cleaner apps, they free memory for about a minute and then it fills right back up.