Firstly you have a noisy mind and quiet mind:
There is verbal thinking and here is pictorial thinking and there is Intuitive thinking.
You only have these 3 types of thinking to deal with, so why are you having difficulty in stopping these thoughts.
These are 3 different types of thinking. If you want to stop something you need to find an anomaly in the process and then use it to stop the process instantly.
Let’s take them one at a time:
Verbal thinking is responsible for most of the noise in your mind. It is not only an observer like the other 2 but it is also a spinner. It can take an observation and spin it into 100 different things. It is the thinking behind the creative force. It is the thinking behind psychological thinking which generates anxiety out of all the lies it creates. It will take a small problem in your head, an anxious thought and create a catastrophe out of it. But this verbal thinking has an anomaly in its process and it is its weak point that you can take advantage of to stop this type of thinking instantly. Its anomaly is that when the mind has to spin a thought it needs to also simultaneously silently speak what it wants to think for it to think at all. If it does not self-talk at the same time what it wants to think then it cannot think. So watch the slight flutter of your vocal cords during this type of thinking. Force yourself not to self-talk and you cannot think. In meditation that is why they use a mantra – it distracts the mind away from self-talk and the mind goes silent.
So, that is some major noise in your mind that you have taken care off. But you still have pictorial thinking and intuitive thinking. These 2 forms of thinking are only observational forms of thinking. They are not spinners like verbal thinking. They can only observe. Images going past in your mind and you just watch them and acknowledge them but you cannot take them and spin them into something else. Intuitive thinking gives you that sense of knowing or intuition. It is not pictorial is it but its thing is this sense of knowing kind of feeling. You will find these 2 types of thinking lingering in your silent mind after you have shut down your verbal thinking mind. These 2 guys to me don’t have any anomalies in them which we can take advantage of to shut them down instantly like verbal thinking. But I found that the longer you remain in the silent mind then slowly they start to drop off the mind. Pictorial thinking, or the image thinking, will first disappear from your mind. Intuitive thinking will linger on a bit longer until it disappears and what’s left is the no-mind state. A no-mind state of “being”. The mind is totally silent and it just is. You can go on like that for the whole day. Give your mind a rest. Peace. And if left longer like that it has been known to disappear altogether and with no memory of where you have been when it comes back.
The Buddhist calls this whole spectrum of the mind the “Dream of existence”. Your whole external world is only a mental construct and you can take it to its edge before it leaps into the void of darkness and disappears.
So, why can you not overcome your anxious thoughts in your mind?