This used to happen to me constantly. I fixed it accidentally in switching to Ripgrep [0] which defaults to recursively searching the current directory. Bonus: it parallelises too!
Honourable mention also to FZF [1] which not only makes it trivial to locate a file in a directory tree, but has revolutionised my history use with its fuzzy matching.
[0] - https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
[1] - https://github.com/junegunn/fzf