Picture this, you pick up your phone and notice that the battery is at say 69% percent. Not nice. You start to get this anxiety gnawing at you. You go to your phone’s battery settings page to check what’s been using up the battery. Nothing out of the ordinary there, the usual smattering of messaging and social media apps. You sigh.
Any of this sound familiar? This feeling is what I call battery anxiety. An illogical worry about running out of battery power and a obsession with keeping your battery percentage as high as possible.
This problem became bigger as I obtained more electronic devices that used batteries. iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, MacBook Air, Kobo ebook reader. All of these have batteries that I need to worry about. Well, at least I feel like I need to worry about them.
In reality, my day to day usage of these devices does not provide any real causes of concern about battery usage. I’ve never hit 0% battery usage on any of these devices while using them. The closest I’ve gotten is that the Apple Watch was around 30% battery after a long day outside.
To mitigate this anxiety, I carry a Anker battery pack in my backpack which I usually have with me when I’m out and about. I’ve never actually needed that battery pack to charge a dead phone. However, putting aside my battery anxiety for a moment, its still a useful thing to keep on me, just in case.
All that said, the battery anxiety situation is improving a bit, I no longer keep my phone on the charger all day while at home. It sits on my desk unplugged. I plug it in to charge at the end of the day when I go to bed. For my ebook reader, I leave it unplugged if I’m actively going through a book during the week. I plug it in at the end of the week when I finish the book.
One small thing I did is to turn off battery percentage display on any devices that support that. This stops me from obsessing over the battery percentage slowly decreasing as I use the device. I still have a rough idea of how much battery I’ve got left so the indicator is serving its function.
Here’s hoping I get better about this particular neurosis going forward.