In a Track by Track description of Brand New Eyes for Alternative Press, Hayley Williams explained:

I wrote all the verses with no melody on the tour with did last spring with Jimmy Eat World. We were going through so much as a band–a lot of negative vibes. I felt hopeless and even faithless a lot of the time. Funny it had to be on a tour with some of our heroes. Nearly a year later, we’re at our practice space and the guys are jamming this song. I just started singing these lyrics, reading them right out of my phone and making up the melodies as we all went along. It worked! I memorized the chorus progression and went home to write the chorus with my guitar in hand. Does anyone beside me think the last line in the chorus sounds like, ‘When I hit the bottle?’ Well, it’s not. Okay?”

The Deluxe Edition of Brand New Eyes included a handwritten lyrics notebook explaining her thought processes in writing the songs. Regarding “Turn It Off”, she wrote:

In accordance with “Playing God”, this song is the emotional result. How I feel when I think about the stupidity displayed by so called Christians and it seems that people who don’t fall back on faith have life figured out. Or at least it works fairly smoothly on the surface. What I’ve found is there is beauty in the “Figuring it out”…I hope I never have life figured out for myself. I want to be in a constant state of learning and growing and I hope God can always show me from the bottom there are more ways to loop up.

She said

In accordance with ‘Playing God’, this song is the emotional result. How I feel when I think about the stupidity displayed by so called Christians and it seems that people who don’t fall back on faith seem to have life figured out. Or at least it works fairly smoothly on the surface. What I’ve found is there is beauty in the “figuring out”… I hope I never have life figured out for myself. I want to be in a content state of learning and growing up and I hope God can always show me from the bottom there are more ways to look up.

Everyone knows what we believe in and our personal choice to believe in Jesus. It’s a struggle in the real world to do that. Sometimes you want to give up. Some of the things we’ve been through – things I’ve been through personally – in the last few years, I’ve felt it would be easier to not have faith in anything and see myself as alone and work at it that way. It sounds like a good idea and I don’t think it’s anything anyone gets over. I also think it’s a hopeful lyric, too. If you find yourself at the bottom, the only way you have is to look up. It can’t get any worse if you’re at the bottom.