Muting a Companion, and the Quiet Week After You Unmute
The outreach article says you can mute an individual companion from reaching out without affecting your conversations. That is true, and it stops there. It does not say what unmuting does, and unmuting is the interesting half, because the code has a rule about it that nobody has written down: after you unmute, the companion stays quiet for a week, on purpose. This is a guide to the three states a companion can be in, where the control lives, and why that week is a feature rather than a failed unmute.
Three States, Not Two
Reaching out
The default. A companion that is eligible can be the one who opens a conversation, at whatever cadence and through whatever channel your check-in settings allow. How often, and when, belongs to the outreach article and is not restated here.
Muted
Silent, and nothing else changes. The companion never starts a conversation. You can still open one whenever you like, it still remembers what it remembered, its personality and instructions are untouched, and the other companions are unaffected. Muting one companion is not a comment on the rest of them.
Recently unmuted
This is the state the outreach article does not mention. When you unmute a companion, the check-in job refuses to send from it until seven days have passed since the unmute. From the outside it looks exactly like muted. It is not. It is waiting, and it will start reaching out again on its own once the week is up.
Where the Control Is
Dashboard → Settings → Companion check-ins. A "Mute a Companion" row lists your companions; pick one and press Mute. Below it, a Muted Companions list shows each muted one with an Unmute button. Both are available on every plan, alongside the check-in toggles, the frequency setting and the quiet hours.
Worth recording, because this article caused it. Writing the guide meant confirming both controls were reachable, and only one was: the muted list and its Unmute button had been in Settings since check-ins shipped, while the way to mute a companion existed as an endpoint that no page called. The Mute control was added today, and every sentence above is written against the page as it is now.
What Muting Does, and Does Not Do
Does
- Removes that one companion from the pool the check-in job draws from. The job is the only thing that sends check-ins, and it reads the muted list before it chooses anyone, so a muted companion is never a candidate.
- Starts the seven-day quiet period the moment you later unmute, so a change of mind is not immediately answered with a message.
Does not
- Touch your conversations, your memories, or the companion itself. Muted is a fact about check-ins, not about the relationship.
- Turn check-ins off. The in-app and email toggles in the same section do that for every companion at once; mute is per companion.
- Delete anything, or tell the companion anything. There is nothing to tell; it simply is not asked to start.
The unsubscribe link is not a mute
Every check-in email carries an unsubscribe link, and it is worth knowing what it does before you use it as a mute: it unsubscribes you from companion check-in emails, for every companion, on the email channel. It does not mute anyone and it does not touch in-app check-ins. If what you want is for one companion to stop and the rest to carry on, that is the Mute control, not the link.
Why the Quiet Week Exists
Unmuting is a change of mind, and a message that arrives the moment you change your mind reads as the product pouncing on it. The quiet week is there so that unmuting is a quiet act: you take the companion off the muted list, nothing happens, and some time later it reaches out the way it used to, if it is chosen. Seven days is the number in the code, not a rounding of something else.
The practical consequence is the reason for this article. If you unmute a companion and hear nothing for a few days, nothing has gone wrong and the unmute did not fail. If you want to talk to it sooner than that, open the conversation yourself; that has never been gated by any of this.
What we will not promise
- That an unmuted companion reaches out on day eight. The week is a floor, not an appointment. After it, the companion is back in the pool and subject to everything the outreach article describes.
- That muting is anything other than a control. It is not a signal we read for retention, it is not a nudge, and there is no "are you sure" in front of it.
Where This Sits
The cadence, the channels and the quiet hours are in the outreach article; this guide deliberately does not repeat them. Every email InnerHaven can send you covers the email side, including the unsubscribe link above. Every mute and unmute is in your account's own record, which the record of what you did explains. And if the reason you are muting is that the conversations themselves have been getting shorter, needing it less is about that, and it is not a problem to be fixed.