Cut your toenails, play bingo – and drink rum instead of lager. Performers including Marina Abramović, Sugababes, Don Letts and Paloma Faith share their tips

You find out about yourself at Glastonbury. It is a campus bursting with lessons for the body and mind. Maybe you have an affirming experience, where you learn you’ve got way more stamina than you realised, that you are able to let your insecurities go and fully let loose, or that actually you really, really like hardstep and you’re building that playlist just as soon as you get home. Or maybe your Damascene moment is a starker one, where your mental age and actual age collide head-on. For better or worse, you will learn something about yourself. And for life lessons learned this year, who better to turn to than the performers and celebrities at this year’s festival?

Marina Abramović, artist
I was terrified at the idea of talking to 200,000 people to create a seven-minute moment of silence. I was really, truly thinking this was almost impossible. But I learned that actually it is possible – to keep the energy concentrated of this amount of people in this moment of human history. And this was something that was a huge discovery: that we humans can change the world by just being together.

Serbian performance artist tells Pyramid stage crowd to confront cyclical violence in thousands-strong ‘collaboration’

It’s been home to some of the UK’s loudest singalongs, most propulsive rap lyrics and most cacophonous guitar solos. But the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury experienced something almost unprecedented in its history on Friday: total silence.

The Serbian artist Marina Abramović, invited by festival organisers Michael and Emily Eavis, led the audience in what she called a “collaboration” called Seven Minutes of Collective Silence, to “see how we can feel positive energy in the entire universe” and act as a bulwark against the horrors of war and violence.

Serbian artist hopes Friday’s ‘public intervention’ will make festival goers reflect on the current state of the world

Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage has played host to some of the loudest rock bands in the world and mass sing-alongs with thousands of participants, but on Friday the artist Marina Abramović will step out and ask the crowd to do something different: remain silent for seven minutes.

“I am terrified,” said Abramović, whose performance pieces have made her one of the most famous artists in the world. “I don’t know any visual artists who have done something like this in front of 175,000 to 200,000 people. The largest audience I ever had was 6,000 people in a stadium and I was thinking ‘wow’, but this is really beyond anything I’ve done.”