Network Traffic Causing Huge Spikes In CPU

For the last week or so, my network traffic has seemed to be related to some pretty sever spikes in my CPU usage. These spikes are causing extreme stuttering in my music playback, freezing of my cursor, and other symptoms of a really laggy computer. This pretty much occurs whenever I use the internet in any way. The worst spikes are when I'm loading webpages in Google Chrome and seeding on uTorrent, often freezing my cursor and music for several seconds at a time, though they're not limited to those two softwares. Prior to this last week, I've never had this problem. My CPU usage never caused any stuttering or lag beyond just slow-running software, but now it's becoming a real issue to use my computer.