When you’re not using your phone overnight, the battery shouldn’t be tanking. A properly-optimized phone should only lose 2-7% battery overnight, but if you’re waking up to see your phone having gone down 8% or more, there’s something wrong with your settings and there are things you can do to significantly improve overnight battery drain if you aren’t plugging in each night.

Here’s how I halved my overnight battery drain from 10% to 5%, and how you can too.

First, find the evidence

See what’s actually using your battery

Some of the tactics mentioned in this article will let you be surgical about finding the cause of overnight battery drain. You can do this by seeing on a per-app basis what is actually draining your battery by going to Settings > Battery.

The next thing to do might be the most overlooked action you can take.

Physically move your phone

Back bedrooms or basements with poor signal drain batteries fast

This one thing might be the biggest factor in why your phone is losing so much battery overnight, especially if you sleep in a back bedroom or a basement where your phone struggles to keep a signal, which could result in a 5-10% battery penalty each night.

If you keep your phone in a location at night with a low cell signal, consider moving it to another room, or moving your phone near a window where there are fewer obstructions to your phone reaching the nearest cell tower.

Another thing you can do, if your carrier supports it, is make sure Wi-Fi calling is turned on, which for the most part circumvents your phone’s need to constantly communicate with the tower by routing telephony and other services over Wi-Fi, which is more power-efficient.

To check if this is turned on, go to Settings > Network & Internet (or Connections if on Samsung) > Tap your SIM > Enable Wi-Fi calling.

The next setting to change is to turn off a feature that is silently using battery while you sleep.

Turn off always on display (AOD)

Let your screen sleep when you do

You most likely have always on display turned on. It’s a helpful thing when you need it, but it uses battery power to illuminate the thousands of pixels that make up the feature. That’s especially egregious when AOD is running all night long while you sleep. You can schedule AOD to reduce battery drain, but one thing is for sure: it shouldn’t be on while you sleep, whether you turn it off entirely or schedule it to be off at night, because it’s burning 0.5-1.5% per hour while you sleep. Over an eight-hour night, that means you are using 4-12% of your battery for no reason.

To turn off AOD on Samsung Galaxy, go to Settings > Lock screen and AOD > AOD. If you have a Pixel, the path is Settings > Display & touch > Always-on display.

The next thing to change has to do with your phone trying to determine its location when you don’t need it to.

Disable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning

Why scan while you sleep?

Even if you turn Wi-Fi or Bluetooth off, there’s a setting that allows your phone to still utilize Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to help with location detection, and it’s using battery even when you aren’t using your phone. I’m talking about Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning.

This feature lets your phone avoid using the GPS for location services, which uses more power, instead relying on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to approximate location based on your vicinity to nearby access points and devices.

While modern Androids throttle how much scanning your phone can do, every time the scan happens, it wakes your device’s CPU from a deep-sleep state, which you don’t need. Instead, your phone can just rely on GPS when you’re actively in need of location services when you’re actually using your phone.

To turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning, go to Settings > Location > Location Services > disable Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning.

The next thing to change is just a simple switch that can get Android to automatically restrict certain apps based on your usage patterns.

Turn on Adaptive Battery

It’s a simple switch

You might already have this turned on, but if your phone is draining a lot at night, it’s worth checking. Adaptive Battery was introduced in Android 9 and intelligently monitors your phone’s usage patterns and will, for example, block networking access in the background if your phone determines it’s an app you don’t use frequently. The main downside to this is that it might delay notifications for certain apps, or cause certain apps you haven’t opened for a while to do a cold refresh. But in my testing, the downsides don’t outweigh the benefit, which is improved battery, especially when you’re not using the phone like at night.

To check if Adaptive Battery is turned on, go to Settings > Battery > Battery Saver > Adaptive Battery.

On Galaxy, the path is a bit different via Settings > Device Care > Battery > Background usage limits > three dots > Adaptive Battery.

If you know of certain apps that are clearly running in the background more than others, you can force them to stop running in the background more aggressively by changing them to a restricted profile.

But this might delay some notifications

Some apps are notorious for actively running in the background, even if you aren’t using them. Social media apps are the biggest culprit. While Adaptive Battery has a similar function, doing this next thing is more targeted for certain apps.

You can restrict background usage on Android on an app-by-app basis, which basically tells your phone to stop the app from running in the background.

To do this, go to Settings > Apps > Open an app > Battery > uncheck “allow background usage” or change the mode to “Restricted” and your phone will stop allowing that app to run in the background, saving battery. I did this for all of my social media apps like Instagram, TikTok, and Threads.

Wake up to less battery drain

As mentioned, with these changes, I was able to reduce my battery drain overnight from 10% to about 5%, with the only downside being that some notifications from my social media apps were a bit slower at coming through.