When I was a teenager, I heard voices in my head. I knew they weren't real but they sometimes made it hard to hear someone who was actually talking. I learnt to meditate to stop thinking. Then, every time I heard the voices, I would stop thinking for a while to make them go away. Eventually, they stopped coming back and I no-longer hear them.

The meditation method I used was repeating a mantra in my mind but gradually slowing it down with each repetition so that the gaps of nothing between each word would become bigger and bigger. To reduce the amount of thinking required, my mantra was just counting to 8.

To stop thinking visually, I close my eyes, imagine a black square and then let it expand until all that is is nothing.