I have always had a healthy mistrust of authority figures. Question the things you are told, and the people saying them. In 2020, this is not a particularly difficult notion to grapple with. Consider, if you will, the current leaders of two of the wealthiest nations on Earth. Ask them the most basic question and they will adopt the expression of a dog that has just encountered a wasp for the very first time.

It was with this mindset that I decided to call up Mr Gordon Matthews, director and cognitive hypnotherapist at City Of London Therapy Centre, with the vague hope that he could help me stop smoking – ie, die less soon – and be a bit jollier about the whole thing in the process. I had recently been reminded via a press release that hypnotism can take away all manner of phobias and anxieties in just two hours, including vices such as smoking – something I have had a pathetically part-time “social” dalliance with for some years. After several failed but wholeheartedly half-hearted attempts to stamp out my amateur habit, I thought this, in my view, off-piste approach might work. If nothing else, I was curious about what exactly hypnotism, or hypnotherapy, entailed.

In a world where lighting up is increasingly taboo and one in which hyper-sophisticated wellness is an obsession, the idea of using hypnotherapy – performed since the late 18th century – to banish tobacco cravings felt like magical thinking. Do I not need to juice cleanse, visit a yogi or give up a vial of my blood? Personally, I would much rather sit on a comfy sofa for an hour while a man waves an implement in front of my eyes for as long as it takes to turn me into what I imagine fitness instructors from Sydney with big Instagram followings look like. I am a spoilt millennial, you see. Give me the quick fix any day.

This, as you might expect, is not how hypnotherapy works.

Mr Gordon Matthews has some 15 years’ experience in hypnotherapy. He has shoulder length, wispy grey hair and he is wearing a jolly graphic shirt, striking brown and white two-tone brogues, and he is beckoning me onto a comfy couch. My resistant psychological barriers are already starting to disintegrate. He is an instantly amiable presence. He tells me he used to smoke 60 a day. His opening gambit is interesting. He says heroin is a far more potent drug to get into than silly old booze or nicotine and is less addictive. Fair point: what exactly am I getting out of cigarettes when it really comes down to it?

But Mr Matthews is not actually suggesting that I swap one poison for another, or that smack is a viable plan B. It is that smoking is a particularly pointless pursuit, and to stop it one must interrupt patterns of behaviour and thinking. It is Mr Matthews’ first suggestion that I do, in fact, have to do some work if I am never to pick up a cigarette again. He is laying some foundations before putting me into a trance in our second meeting.

For the time being, he says, I must think about what I want my new, more positive life to look like. Also, you don’t “give up” anything. You stop! You quit!

He asks me how things might be if I never smoked a cigarette and notices that I tell him everything that I don’t want to be rather than things I would like. You shouldn’t say “I don’t want something to happen”, he says. Your subconscious is just reminded of the bad thing. I find that it’s actually quite hard to articulate things that I really want, which is perhaps one of the reasons I find myself in a therapist’s office.

To both of our amusement, I even find it tricky answering the straightforward question, “What is good about you?” Who would have thought it: be more positive, visualise what you want and nicer things will happen to you.

“I’m going into the unconscious mind so the conscious mind understands exactly what you want out of it,” he says. “Because at the moment it doesn’t.” 

Another tool is presented to me. “The unconscious mind responds to shock and aggression,” says Mr Matthews. “I invented something called Dr Fro…You won’t have heard of this because I haven’t published it.” Sounds cerebral – I lean forward in my chair. There is a dramatic pause. He tells me to tell any negative thoughts to “fuck right off”.

Next is a neuro-linguistic programming test to see how my brain processes things. I put the answers to some strange questions in order of importance and he does some sums. I am a kinaesthetic, apparently. This is news I receive with the same sort of pride you might feel if you’re told you have synaesthesia; maybe I have the type of brain that can elicit both awe and sympathy!

Alas, not. It simply means that the first thing my brain processes is feelings. It is therefore drawn to things that feel good – in other words, stuff that will likely harm it – more readily than other people with, say, a logical brain. I think of Peep Show’s Super Hans, and his law of “if it feels good, do it!” Am I Super Hans? No one wants to be Super Hans.

Finally, another neat trick for any cravings you might have of various stripes. Imagine a shape (the craving) and make it gradually smaller until it has disappeared, and then fill your thoughts with any colour that comes to mind: this is the colour of health and recovery. For some reason, I think of yellow – the famously refreshing, healthful colour of decay and, well, nicotine stains.

For our second session, Mr Matthews is wearing two-tone brogues again, but this time they are black and white and they are so shiny you can see your face in them. Perhaps these are his showman pair, I think.

I am excited to be hypnotised. He assures me it will not resemble anything like what I have seen attempted on TV by  mentalist Mr Derren Brown and his ilk. Mr Brown carefully selects people, apparently, who are “somnambulists” and susceptible to, for example, being convinced they are experiencing the apocalypse. Mr Matthews won’t convince me I am experiencing the apocalypse, he tells me. He is just going to put me in a trance and have a word with my subconscious. But before he does that, he will put me in a chair and push me back so far that my torso is parallel to the ground. I close my eyes.

In this state, he asks me to imagine my life as a timeline – my future in front of me and my past behind me. He asks questions about my past, invites me to picture my future, and has me fly up and down the timeline of my life looking down on various events, engaging with my unconscious mind. I meet the guy who first tried a cigarette. We have a chat. He’s quite receptive to my advice that smoking a cigarette is a rubbish idea. Mr Matthews asks me to envision my future and speaks in a soft voice; I note that he is telling me things I said to him in the first session.

After a little while, I come to. He asks me how long I think I have been facing the ceiling with my legs in the air. Five minutes, I shrug, slightly groggy and confused. It’s been half an hour.

I realise my head feels light. I am positively giddy. Have I been drugged? Where’s my wallet? I do not own a wallet… I feel like the guy at a party who thinks he’s been talking merrily to a room full of people for 20 minutes, but really it is 8.00am, everyone has gone home and the host is shaking his head while emptying cans of lager down the sink.

But Mr Matthews is not shaking his head. He asks me some questions and I try to say words in an order that make sense. I fail. Several attempts result in laughter. I try to describe how I feel and inadvertently invent a new word. “Transmormatitive?”

I think I have just been tilted back in a chair to such an angle that all the blood has rushed to my head. In fact, a man I have known for one hour and 43 minutes has taken me for a walk through the depths of my own psyche, unleashing powerful endorphins and liberating me of various deep-set psychological chains. I don’t really feel like leaving the chair I am in and I don’t want for anything stronger than a glass of water.

Mr Matthews calmly tells me that we have just spoken to my unconscious mind and done a bit of regression to unpick the reasons why I might ever smoke. He reminds me that indulging in behaviour that does not serve you is like a trance in itself. He has un-hypnotised me, he says.

“You are in hypnotic trances all the time. Like when you’re at your desk and you’re so into your work that you’re completely oblivious to everyone around you. That’s a hypnotic trance. Having a cigarette is a hypnotic trance. All our behaviours come from somewhere. It all has a positive intent. Even if it is taking hard drugs,” he says. “That’s some pretty powerful shit that we’ve just done.”

But, he reminds me again, it is me who has done the work. “I can come up with an opinion and your subconscious will say, ‘that’s bollocks’. I’m using your motivation. We have to work out what you want and as soon as you get that in the subconscious then, hey bingo.” He tells me the key to this is using the conscious-mind tools we learnt in the first session in tandem with what we have just told my subconscious.

I leave his office with some new homework. Before our third and final session (a shorter trance, which will “lock in” and future-proof what my conscious and subconscious mind has learned), I must go to the pub, Mr Matthews tells me. In the name of science, health and all that is pure, go to the pub, drink and see if you crave a cigarette. So, off to the pub I go. I nurse a few pints. I do not crave a cigarette. Even the beer tastes a bit… unhealthy? Have my subconscious desires been altered forever? I think so.

Two things are for sure. I now know that hypnotherapy is closer to the more mainstream therapy that you may be familiar with than moving objects, clicking fingers and instant magical results. And, I will never claim to have complicated psychological barriers or trust issues again.

Listening back to the iPhone recording of our hypnotism, I am as receptive as they come, as daft as a brush, a slurring, agreeable, puppy – putty in the hand of hypnotherapists or whomever else who may wish to delve into the deep recesses of my mind, for good or ill.