Practicing meditation allows us to be aware of thoughts rather than to stop us from thinking. It is a cultivation of inner wisdom, self awareness and insight that requires participation in the form of staying aware (awake).
When you become aware of the thoughts that are emerging within you it becomes apparent that you are not choosing your thoughts. Do you have an experience of choosing your thoughts or are just aware of thoughts being there?
Many seem to be struggling with stress, anxiety, and depression, but they do not decide to be depressed or anxious, they are struggling to cope with the thoughts that are present within themselves that create the experience of those feelings/sensations.
You can’t tell someone to snap out of it, because the thoughts have taken control, and until something shifts or changes within the person experiencing ‘being depressed’, then nothing can change for them.
The brain has been shown to be pliable, changeable and a person can completely change themselves by dismissing the fear thoughts and making the positive ones more prominent so they hear them first and they appear louder.
We can create new habits by changing the thoughts we align with that are conducive to the new habit or behaviour, and this effectively re-wires the brain.
Thoughts are always available to everyone, and in the open spacious awareness that meditation brings we can choose which thoughts to align with. Unless you have freed yourself from duality, we are all subject to an endless stream of positive and negative thoughts bombarding us continually. Did you choose to have a hateful thought, an attack thought, a fearful thought or were you just aware of them arising within you?
What is it that makes us believe the thoughts and take them to be 'ours' and allow them to define us?
During meditation I am always surprised by thoughts that I notice and sometimes they can take me aback. There seems to be a deeply negative thread that runs through us which is inherent of the human condition that perhaps keeps us trapped in doubt and fear. What is it that we are afraid of? This fear keeps us away from the bliss and peace of our true nature, away from the incessant duality of good and bad.
I've also become aware of the stark difference between insights that emerge from within as inspirations and Knowings, and the endless stream of random cumulative thoughts.
When we are trying to control our life we are going against the flow of the present moment and the insight and inspiration that is always present but cant be heard through the 'thought noise'.
Science has shown us that yes we can. Nothing is set in stone as it were,
and isn’t it interesting that we can only see and experience what we perceive
and believe to be possible or relevant to our views and experiences? The observer effect and confirmation bias further blur the reality of experience and what we are believing to be true at any given time.
Along with that, put into the picture that when you inquire as to the nature of ‘Who Am I’ you find there to be no-one and no-thing there. So what is it that you see and react to? If there is no ‘you’ then there is no ‘them’, it is all an experience happening within consciousness being taken to be ‘real’.
Noticing thoughts brings up questions in me such as; Is it possible to have original thought? Especially when thoughts are not chosen but just heard; or rather, experienced. 
Great post! This does certainly seem to make the quest that so many people have (myself included) to be truly original seem sort of futile doesn't it. Though even with a lack of free-will or being our own true inner creators, we are still unique beings capable of creating totally special things specific to our (non)-selves. Yay Paradoxes!
Thank you :) Life, confirmation bias and other bias we have make things seem so subjective and difficult to know what is 'reality'. All part of this rich experience :)