There’s been a growing belief that charging your phone overnight or simply keeping it connected after it gets to a hundred percent actually kills your battery.

Some people even believe that leaving your phone charging overnight could lead it to blow up or something along those lines and to some extent, these beliefs do hold water but that’s not the entire story.

See, the belief stems from old people (no offence to stone age Twitter) who interacted with old gadgets that had poor battery management at the software level, this resulted in the batteries getting damaged for “overcharging”.

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But its 2019 and batteries have come a log way, especially on smartphones. Apart from gaining more capacity, they have gained some smarts in the way they do power management.

As we get to debunking the myth, let’s first start with understanding what exactly kills a battery. Each time you use up your battery from 100 to zero, that is considered a full cycle. If you recharge it at 50%, then that’s half a cycle.

Batteries start to degrade after about 400 cycles which comes to about one and a half year of usage on a smartphone. Leaving your phone plugged in and the battery at 100% does not affect your charge cycle, using your phone on the other hand does.

Your phone’s battery is smart enough to stop charging when it gets to 100% thus you really have nothing to worry about.

“Smartphones, as the name would suggest, are smart. Every unit has a built-in chip that will prevent charging once 100% capacity has been reached. –  says a representative from Anker, a battery and charging accessories maker.

However, there’s still a potential problem

As much as keeping your device connected has no effect on your battery directly, a result of this may affect the battery.

Charging your phone produces heat and this heat could damage your phone. But this heat is not only produced when connected overnight, but the heat is produced regardless of the time the phone is charged.