There are 2 types of thinking in your mind and one of them is easy to control because it has a physical anomaly that you can easily control:
The best way to use your mind is to stay centred in the silent mind and keep verbal thinking in the periphery and use it only when you need to. Verbal thinking is a self-talk thinking process. It is a deliberate thinking process that you can easily control. Verbal thinking is when you have to silently verbalise your thoughts for you to think at all. You silently verbalise because the brain needs to hear you, like in a conversation with another, so the brain can process your thoughts. You can end this type of thinking by keeping the slight flutter of your vocal cords still and hence bring on the silent mind.
You can easily learn to have control over your thinking mind by staying centred in the silent mind and only use verbal thinking when you have to spin an idea or be creative.
The silent mind, mainly observational, communicates with the space around it in a totally different way to verbal thinking:
Connected to the universe:
Road map of the thinking mind:
Is there any way to tell your brain what to think and not to think? Opinions and biases and conditioning in the mind are created by spinning experiences via verbal thinking. If you do not like what you are thinking just stop verbalising your thoughts. You can stop a verbal thought anytime you want to by just stopping the flutter of your vocal cords in verbal thinking.
Visual thinking or image-making in the silent mind is more difficult to stop, especially when they rise from your subconscious mind when the mind is silent. Some of these memories rising can be unwanted and problematic. Make peace with them and watch them appear and disappear and soon in time, they will subside. But there is no physical anomaly in visual thinking like there is in verbal thinking to stop image-making in the mind when the mind is silent.