IntelliJ Freezing when booting with JDK 8

I downloaded the latest Java SE Development Kit 8u221 from Oracle in order to use it with intelliJ IDEA (Ultimate 2019.2).

I added Java 8 to the SDK list in Structure for New Projects and set the Project SDK to 1.8 (which is Java 8).

Everything works fine up until this point, but my teacher wants to keep going and in the Find Action in the Help menu, she wanted to to 'Switch Boot JDK' to jdk 8 that i downloaded. The location of the jdk was in the options and I picked it and restarted intelliJ.

Now every time i open intelliJ and click on the Project pane, intelliJ freezes and I have to Force quit it.

Is there a way to fix this? or at least troubleshoot?

I am running macOS Mojave 10.14.6