I think part of the pressure comes from imagining that one needs to have a stand-out essay in order to be admitted to a top university. Most high school seniors–even very well qualified ones–would not have an idea of how to craft one of those. I have seen sample essays that were commended by the readers, but that I thought were pretty ho-hum. I have also seen sample essays that seemed out-and-out frightening to me, in that I thought they were quite near to the borderline for acceptance by the New Yorker. They were not like anything ever written by any high schooler I have known. Probably they were entirely legitimate, and written unaided, just outside of my range of observations.
Although your standards for “stand-out” might be different from mine, in my experience it is not actually true that a “stand-out” essay is needed.
If I knew someone who was struggling to get started with an essay, I would ask: What matters to you, and why? What do you think is funny? What have you found challenging recently? (For that one, not “balancing homework and ECs,” but something deeper.) What do you wonder about? What do you wish you knew, and how do you plan to find out? If you wanted to convey something important about your background to someone else, without simply stating it in a matter-of-fact way, what would you say to give them a glimpse of what makes you unique and what makes you like most other people? If the writer has a twitter account: What have you tweeted that resonated with the largest number of other people? Why do you think that was? Who inspires you, and why? (There are a lot of grandparent essays out there.) Did you ever read a book that changed the way you thought? (Please avoid Ayn Rand.) How do you feel when you can’t solve a problem? Do you think math is elegant? Why are so many natural phenomena describable mathematically? What would you do if you learned that an intelligent group of aliens had reached Alpha Centauri? How will anyone who follows you at your high school know that you were there, or care? In your community, to whom have you made a difference, how, and why? Do you truly care about someone else? How do your actions show that? What aspect of your personality goes deepest below the surface?
These might not yield a stand-out essay, but I think they might yield a serviceable one. Others could offer balance to my views, which I would characterize as “partially informed.”
My daughter once looked at the set of prompts suggested by a university, and assumed that she needed to write an essay that covered all of the suggested topics. Needless to say, that one was discarded.