Living in a crowded, noisy part of town can make even staying at home tiring. There can be car horns from out in the street or noisy neighbors blasting their stereo. If this happens on a regular basis, it can have a serious negative impact on your health.
A quiet home is important to your well-being. If the noise gets to you and interferes with your relaxation and sleep, then maybe it’s time to consider getting insulation to soundproof your home.
More Rest and Less Stress
The most obvious and most important benefit to having soundproofing insulation is that less noise results in better relaxation by reducing disturbance to sleep and other activities.
You might be tempted just to ignore the noise. After all, whatever noise you experience in your home is likely intermittent; it goes away after a while and might not be worth investing in a permanent solution for. This might work at first.
However, a lack of quality rest time takes its toll on you. You might be able to ignore noise for a time, but you can’t ignore the physical and psychological effects it has on you. Quality rest is needed for your body and mind to heal and wind down.
The Negative Effects of Noise
Noise pollution has several negative effects on your well-being. It’s been linked to high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, depression, increased anxiety, and tinnitus.
Regardless of whether the noise is the engines of a plane flying overhead or the hum of the TV, it can activate your brain’s fight or flight response. And it aggravates existing health conditions by increasing stress levels.
Stress itself causes a variety of symptoms, including physical, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral symptoms. You become more prone to negative emotions, have less energy, possibly get tense muscles, are less able to focus, have less of an appetite, and more.
If it comes to the point that the noise affects your sleep, its negative effects on your well-being are unsurprisingly magnified.
The Positive Effects of Silence
By installing soundproofing insulation, you avoid the negative effects of noise and benefit from the healthy effects of silence.
Silence has been found to stimulate brain growth. It enhances sleep and lessens insomnia. And it restores your mental strength, allowing you to better use your creativity and do some self-reflection. Even just 10 minutes in total silence does wonders for your concentration.
You’re probably bombarded with various stressors throughout the day. There’s work, unpleasant relations to deal with, bad news about the pandemic, and many other possible stressors winding you up. Home should be a refuge where you can block all of this out. You don’t need your neighbor’s music adding to your irritation.
Eliminate the noise, and your home becomes a much healthier place to live in.
A Better Home Environment
A quiet home with each room undisturbed by noise is a peaceful home. Soundproofing insulation makes your home much more comfortable. In addition to preventing noise from the outside coming in, it prevents noise from going from room to room.
To add to your comfort, soundproofing insulation doesn’t just insulate your home from sound, it also prevents heat from coming in or escaping. This makes it easier to keep your home at your preferred temperature, meaning your home is cooler during summer and warmer during winter. It also saves you money on your energy bills as you spend less electricity on appliances to cool or heat your home.
Privacy and Peace of Mind
As discussed earlier, quality rest and lack of noise are incredibly important to maintaining your health. But what if, for example, the people you live with want to watch a movie late at night? Perhaps you have a child practicing an instrument?
Maybe you’re the one who wants to relax with an activity that’s relatively noisy but don’t want to inconvenience the rest of the people in the house. Perhaps you’re singing in your room and don’t want anyone to hear you. Or you’re chatting with some friends over the phone, or online on your PC, and want your conversations to be private.
Regardless of what it is, soundproofing insulation will keep any sound from escaping the room or at least muffle it to the point that it can’t be understood. It helps the whole household avoid disturbance from individual members.
A Better Learning Environment
Noise is bad for children’s development.
Children that live in noisy environments have a harder time reading. Noise distracts them from important stimuli like their parents talking to them. It makes it harder for them to distinguish similar sound words. “Hit” and “bit,” for example, can sound very similar when there’s background noise messing with a child’s hearing.
Noise doesn’t just affect children’s language either. It can disrupt non-auditory tasks as well, so it could potentially disrupt the development of their other sensory skills.
By installing soundproofing insulation in your home, you’re also protecting your children. It keeps their young minds from being overwhelmed by too many stimuli, be it from loud construction outside or any noise made by family members within the house.
Of course, it’s not just children. While an adult’s learning and development wouldn’t be affected as much by noise, distractions would still hinder your reading or slow your learning of new skills. Learning is much easier when there aren’t any external sources of stress like noise.
More Effective Communication
Soundproofing your home allows for better communication between everyone living in it.
Noise can make it hard to have good conversations at home. This is partly because noise makes it harder to understand the other person, but it is also largely due to the aforementioned negative effects of noise on your health.
Sometimes, communication between household members is strained enough due to the family going through a rough patch. A noisy environment aggravates this and worsens your mental state, making it harder to resolve issues and misunderstandings.
Healthy communication is necessary for a happy household. And soundproofing insulation helps keep everyone calmer and thinking clearer by blocking out the noise.
Soundproofing Your Home
Soundproofing insulation materials are installed into your walls and ceiling. As sound comes into contact with the materials, the insulation reflects or absorbs noise and converts it into heat before it goes past your walls.
Homeowners are advised to insulate their homes from top to bottom. However, different insulation materials are suited for each part of a room. For most of your walls and entryways, blown-in and spray foam insulation are your best choices. For floors and ceilings, foam boards, rigid foam panels, and blanket batts are more suitable.
Some materials are harder to install than others, depending on whether your wall or ceiling is already in place. Blanket batts are better installed while a wall or ceiling is being built. But blown-in and spray foam insulation can be installed in finished walls or ceilings and hard-to-reach places.
It’s possible to install soundproofing insulation yourself if you have the tools and expertise. However, it is much more advisable to hire professionals to do the job for you. Improper handling of soundproofing insulation materials can irritate your skin and cause you to inhale small fibers and particles, possibly triggering respiratory issues.
Additional Ways to Soundproof Your Home
In addition to installing soundproofing insulation into your walls and ceilings, there are a few other ways you can soundproof your home.
The simplest way is to use rugs or carpets and stuffed and cushioned furniture. Rugs or carpets are effective for dampening the sound of footsteps on flooring like hardwood and tiles, which make a lot of noise. They also absorb sound, preventing it from bouncing from the floor. Similarly, stuffed furniture and cushions absorb sounds and help reduce echo.
While not ideal for your whole home, you can use acoustic tiles in select rooms for extra soundproofing. They absorb sound and limit reverberation. If you have a music room, this is perfect for improving the sound quality there as it will reduce noise from outside as well echo from the instruments.
Solid doors have a thicker density and are good for blocking out noise. For windows, you can use double-pane windows, which have air between the two glass panes and sound-absorbing curtains.
Take note that while these are effective means of soundproofing your home, they are best used in combination with soundproofing insulation. This is because your walls and ceilings are the parts of your home that come into contact with sound the most.
Get Soundproof Insulation for Your Home with A+ Insulation
Finding a solution to a quieter home is of utmost importance. And the cost of soundproofing your home is small in comparison to the costs associated with the health problems caused by noise exposure.
A+ Insulation will install soundproofing insulation for your home. We have a dedicated installation team with decades of experience, ready to make your home a quieter, more relaxing place.
Call us at (913) 281-2250 or send us a message and ask for a quote or schedule an appointment.