The lights dim in the theatre. You try to lose yourself in the show but the day’s stresses seep in. You write to-do lists in your head, fret about tomorrow’s meeting and decide to deal with some emails in the interval. Now consider the performers centre-stage. While we may have an off day or occasionally put ourselves on cruise control, that’s not an option if you’re starring in a huge stage show. Unlike most of us, they have got a paying audience – with high expectations – watching them at work. How do they manage it, night after night? And what could we learn from them about dealing with pressure? I decided to talk to a musical-theatre star, a ballerina and an opera singer to get some tips on channelling some of that energy and drive – maybe even a bit of razzle-dazzle – into our daily lives.

First, I visit Adrienne Warren, who for eight months has been playing Tina Turner in the hit West End musical Tina. It’s a phenomenal performance – hands down the best I’ve seen all year. Warren is a “triple threat”: a powerhouse actor, dancer and singer. She nails Turner’s trademark rasp on around two dozen songs, from the raw 60s R&B duets with Ike to the big-hair ballad belters of Tina’s 1980s heyday. That’s impressive enough, but she has also mastered the moves for some slick, shimmering routines. And then there’s the acting. Warren morphs from young Tina, embarking on a career and a relationship that would both implode, through her determination to overcome abuse and prejudice, until she finds satisfaction in love and music as a mature woman. She caps off an already sensational show by reprising a handful of Turner’s greatest hits in a mini-concert. On Saturdays she does the whole thing twice.

We meet in her dressing room, which has one of those showbiz mirrors that is studded with lightbulbs. But the real wattage belongs to Warren. It is late on a Friday afternoon and I’m staggering into the weekend; she is fully focused, gearing up for a show tonight and two tomorrow. “By the end of the day that’s almost 50 songs,” she says of the Saturdays, which give her little more than an hour and a half to rest between performances. “It’s brutal! I just turn the lights down low in the dressing room and zone out. Quiet time is pretty crucial.”

The show’s director, Phyllida Lloyd, reckons Warren “never wastes one calorie of energy on things that aren’t important”. As a bit of a procrastinator, I’m immediately envious of this efficiency, which helps her deal with the demands of her role. “I would argue that it’s a record set for female musical theatre roles,” says Warren. “It’s extremely physical, vocally demanding and emotionally demanding.” She found the prospect of playing Turner thrilling and terrifying. If it has been tough at times, she hasn’t lost sight of what an amazing opportunity it is. “The thing about this job that often we forget as performers is we got into it because we loved it. Because as a kid it was fun – I loved telling stories. You kind of have to revert to that mindset.”

That’s a good tip if you’re passionate about your demanding job. What if you’re not? Warren highlights the importance of bonding with colleagues rather than shutting yourself off. She and her co-star Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, who plays Ike Turner, “check in almost every day” before the show, when they run through fight choreography. “We hug and say: ‘How are you feeling?’ It’s a good moment for us. The company is unbelievably supportive. The Ikettes come in here often and eat all the candy.” As a “little bit of a perfectionist” it would be easy for Warren to become isolated and obsessive about technical details but, she says: “I don’t want to feel like a robot every day.”

She learned from the best about how to prepare for a pressured situation and then ease up in the moment. In 2016, she was in the musical Shuffle Along with Audra McDonald, who has been starring in Broadway shows for 25 years. “Watching her on and off stage, I was so surprised at how calm she seemed to be,” says Warren. “I remember thinking, you have to work hard and then let go and release.”

She has also learned to rest when she needs to. “If my body tells me, ‘You need to sleep until four o’clock,’ I do it, because one thing you can’t do in this particular role is fight your body. It is your instrument.” I’m not sure how far the “four o’clock lie-in” would get you in most jobs but even if you’re not singing and dancing to Proud Mary on a nightly basis, recognising when you have been pushing yourself to the limit is important for everyone. So is watching what you eat. After the show, Warren will have whatever she fancies for dinner but before and during it, there are snacks on standby to provide energy. She will have a boiled egg if she needs a protein hit. Plus “it’s all about hydration”, she adds. Water bottles are hidden on stage for her to swig from in rare moments of calm.

For singers, a mastery of breathing techniques is essential to avoid bringing tension into the chest, hampering your delivery. Warren FaceTimes her voice teacher in New York once a week to do a complex series of breathing exercises, performed in a squatting position, that are like “hitting a recharge button on yourself”. Any of us can use breath control to help ourselves think clearly. Warren suggests accompanying it with a kind of mantra, saying: “There are things that I’m not in control of right now but I am in control of myself. We are always in control of ourselves – our choices, our breathing, the stories we tell.”

Another important way to reduce stress is to separate your personal and professional lives. When I ask Warren how she unwinds, she points to a guitar in the corner of the room. Hang on – you can’t unwind from being in a hit musical by playing more music, can you? But Warren is a rock singer in her own right. Playing and writing tracks with another musician, she says, “allows me to connect with myself emotionally. People forget that this is not my voice that I sing in.” Does she have a rule that she can’t belt out Tina songs at home? “No, I don’t have a rule!” She roars with laughter. “I still listen to her albums. It’s crazy that I haven’t got sick of it at all. I have moments on stage where I hear a guitar and just think: ‘Oh man, what a great riff!’”

Warren says that if something goes wrong on stage it will bug her – but only briefly because she is kept so busy in the show. She knows that being simply the best, every single night, simply isn’t realistic. When I call Lauren Cuthbertson, a principal dancer at the Royal Ballet, she tells me about a recent performance when she didn’t feel as if she had done her best. But she is quick to add: “I’m not going to not sleep at night and hate myself and bring myself down, when ultimately there are just a few key things I need to apply to make sure it’s better.” In this instance, Royal Ballet director Kevin O’Hare gave her a couple of pointers. She plans to practise those things this afternoon and “cannot wait to get back on stage tonight to rectify that”.

What types of pressure has Cuthbertson faced? “There’s a famous saying in the ballet world that was drilled into me when I was younger: ‘You’re only as good as your last performance.’” She joined the company in 2002 and has been a principal now for 10 years. I ask if it has got easier or harder. She says the pressure was there from the start but what has been added to the mix is expectation. The issue is how much “you allow yourself to feel that expectation or whether you push yourself more and more into you doing the best you can”.

Cuthbertson has danced the big parts – Manon, Giselle, Juliet – but the recent performance that disappointed her came in a minor role. “I’m used to having three hours to establish myself over an evening and in this I’m on stage for about eight minutes,” she laughs. “It goes to show that every time you appear on stage it means something.”

Over the years she has learned to ease up on the day of a big performance. “I probably used to be quite neurotic about the day. I wouldn’t like to talk to people, necessarily. I just wanted to stay in the ‘zone’. Now I realise that doesn’t help at all – it makes you feel more tense.”

I wonder if there are techniques she has learned in ballet that have helped in her personal life. She says she uses imagery when anticipating an important event. Imagine clearly how you would like it to go, she suggests, but allow room in your imagination for spontaneity too. “How would you like to feel in that moment to deal with the pressure?” she asks. “Imagine what you’re wearing. How will it feel? Will it be warm? Will it be cold? What will it smell like?” Before a performance she will sometimes go through a whole show like this in her head. Fatigue means that you can’t keep physically practising something continually. Using your imagination can become another type of rehearsal.

In her late 20s, injuries prevented Cuthbertson from performing. It was a challenging period but, she says, “what also comes from that is something really beautiful, and that is perspective”. Now 34, she is glad she gained what she calls the “amazing ability to realise that what you do is a very small, minuscule contribution to the world”. In the same way that Warren unwinds with a different style of singing, Cuthbertson loves hitting the dancefloor to relieve pressure (“You just need a really good DJ to bring the tunes”). She also recommends meditation but not necessarily practised in isolation. Cuthbertson achieves a calming and focusing of the mind when she is in the studio. “Whenever a dancer puts their hand on the barre, interestingly enough, I think it becomes our meditation. It’s this focus. You put your hand on the barre and you know you’re beginning the pathway to a performance.”

When I call the Australian opera singer Stuart Skelton, shortly after he has arrived in New York to do Otello at the Met, he explains the importance of what happens after a show, as well as before. He performs around the world and prefers to stay within walking distance of the venue, ideally 20 minutes or so in order to walk back after performing to “physically process what the performance has done for you”. Some gentle but continuous exercise not only helps burn off “whatever adrenaline high you’re probably still on” but provides psychological distance between your personal and professional lives. It makes me think of Wemmick, the clerk in Great Expectations, whose features gradually soften as he walks from the office to his castle home in Walworth.

A bit of exercise after work – even if it’s just getting off the bus early – can help you stroll off the day’s stresses. But Skelton also recommends getting in touch with your younger self. He seized roles in his 20s that he would “probably never have done if I’d given them a minute’s thought” and says that as performers mature, they can lose this “livewire” approach. This is part of “the whole process of becoming an adult – we unlearn some of the things that make children so remarkable”. In other words, we lose the unabashed abandon of childhood and doubts can seep in.

However, Skelton highlights the importance of recognising your strengths. He is a heldentenor, which he means he has a super-powered, dramatic, heroic-sounding voice that is suited to Wagner epics. “Look at the tenor roles of any of the Donizetti operas,” he says. “Most of them come in at about three hours. Usually by hour three of anything I’m in, we’re not even in the last act. But I could not sing any one of those Donizetti tenor roles.” He says precious few, “once-in-a-lifetime” singers can handle a vast repertoire and if young singers try to emulate that approach “it ends up shutting their career down”. Much better, he says, is knowing where your “sweet spot” is before gradually expanding your range. “Look at guys like Juan Diego Flórez. He has been singing beautifully and at the top of his game for some time now in a very specific band of repertoire. Only just now, with Traviata in New York, is he starting to expand into a slightly fuller repertoire. He’s a very smart singer who knows exactly where his parameters lie. That’s the secret for all of us.”

This strikes me as good advice to avoid finding yourself out of depth in any situation. Skelton also has tips for dealing with a heavy workload if you’re under the weather. When he’s ill, he looks at “each little part you sing in the show as the only thing you have to sing. So I walk out, I’ve got this little scene, and then I’m done, I don’t need to worry about it. Then you come offstage, you reset, and start the process again.” Breaking it all down into bitesize pieces “spares you physically and mentally”.

How does Skelton stay healthy? His reply is instant: “I don’t catch public transport! I avoid it like it is, in fact, the plague.” A colleague has just given him a bottle named Take a Sick Day, Asshole. “If I’ve got a cold, I can’t function,” he says. “If I can’t function then, like a cab driver, I don’t get paid … We have to be aware that our livelihood every time is on the line … Be mindful of your surroundings.”

So to recap: performing under pressure is all about prioritising tasks, keeping your friends close, knowing your strengths, using your imagination and channelling your inner child. Or alternatively: sleeping in till four, scoffing boiled eggs and hitting the dancefloor. Skelton adds another technique that requires a big enough gap in his performance schedule to accommodate it. “I’ll find somewhere to sit for 45 minutes or so,” he begins. I see: more mindfulness, eh? “And I’ll knock off a really nice Cuban cigar.”

• Adrienne Warren is in Tina: The Tina Turner Musical at the Aldwych theatre, London. Lauren Cuthbertson is in The Concert, The Nutcracker and The Two Pigeons at the Royal Opera House, London. Stuart Skelton is in Otello at the Metropolitan Opera, New York.