Cleaning out Storage

I have 236 gb storage on my 5 year old laptop.  I can’t download anything because an error message says there’s not enough storage. (Other things taken up by documents, etc.)

When I looked at my storage, it shows that 172 GB is taken up by something called applications and programs. When I click on that to see what is so huge taking up space the biggest thing is only one gigabyte. There are so many different programs that I don’t have a clue what they are, and honestly, I feel like there’s not enough to make up 171 GB.

how do I clean this up and get rid of all this free storage base on my computer when I don’t even know what the majority of these things are. I don’t want to delete something critical.