Songfacts®:

• Being alone with your thoughts can be excruciating, with unwanted memories and doubts creeping in. An effective tactic to dodge this kind of self-reflection is to pour yourself into your work or maybe keep music going as a distraction, which Mitski confesses to in this song. She says the lyrics are "quite literal and self-explanatory," so the story about making herself sick by eating and entire inconvenient Christmas cake could very well be true. Her music often reflects her active mind, which makes her very creative and productive but can be hard to tame.
• Mitski wrote this song and made the demo soon after recording her 2018 album Be The Cowboy. She went on hiatus a year later and revisited the song when she returned, including it on her 2023 album The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We.
  
  "This is one of those tracks that ended up being really easy to make because the end result is so similar to the demo we made way back when," she explained in a video. "I think we even kept the guitar track from the demo - it was pretty straightforward."
• Mitski got out of her vocal comfort zone on "I Don't Like My Mind," especially when she lets loose at the end. "When I wrote songs for my own voice to sing, after a while I found that I just started to write songs that are very comfortable for me to sing but that also means I tend to not write songs that are very challenging for me to sing," she said. "So I'm sure you've noticed a lot of my songs just have me singing quietly and within a certain range. I think other singer-songwriters do that too. But for this track it was actually really nice to belt at the end because I wrote for myself to belt and I remembered I could still do it. It was fun and easier than other tracks to make, and it was fun to perform. Yeah I'm a fan."