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How To Soundproof A Therapist’s Office
Author: Eric Zuck
Last Updated: February 9, 2024
Read Time: 7 Minutes
How To Soundproof A Therapist’s Office
Author:
Eric Zuck
Last Updated:
February 9, 2024
Read Time:
7 Minutes
Author: Eric Zuck
Updated: Feb. 9, 2024
Read Time: 7 Minutes
Therapy is a crucial part of many people's lives. Cultivating your mental health is just as important as your physical well-being, and therapy is a useful tool to build or maintain mental health. A lot goes into a therapy session, and having productive conversations is hard enough without unwanted noise invading the conversation.
At Second Skin, we help professionals keep their conversations private and confidential, whether it’s human resources, a doctor’s office, or a therapist. If you are a therapist who’s found your way to this article, chances are you’ve had one or more very uncomfortable experiences due to sound traveling from room-to-room. Even if that sound is not fully intelligible, unwanted noise can lead to distractions and less productive conversations.
The good news is that more private and confidential conversations is a very attainable goal, and you’ve already found an expert who can help you achieve it. (That’s us!) In this article, we will go over the best ways to soundproof a therapist’s office and overview our most installed solutions.
Therapy is a crucial part of many people's lives. Cultivating your mental health is just as important as your physical well-being, and therapy is a useful tool to build or maintain mental health. A lot goes into a therapy session, and having productive conversations is hard enough without unwanted noise invading the conversation.
At Second Skin, we help professionals keep their conversations private and confidential, whether it’s human resources, a doctor’s office, or a therapist. If you are a therapist who’s found your way to this article, chances are you’ve had one or more very uncomfortable experiences due to sound traveling from room-to-room. Even if that sound is not fully intelligible, unwanted noise can lead to distractions and less productive conversations.
The good news is that more private and confidential conversations is a very attainable goal, and you’ve already found an expert who can help you achieve it. (That’s us!) In this article, we will go over the best ways to soundproof a therapist’s office and overview our most installed solutions.
Why Should You Soundproof A Therapist’s Office?
Imagine going into a therapy session, and you can hear people talking through the walls in adjacent rooms. If you plan to be a therapist for very long, it’s just not an acceptable situation. Privacy is required, and even lower level distractions can make a session less productive.
We break down unwanted noise in a therapist’s office into two categories:
- MUST FIX: If you have room-to-room noise where adjacent rooms can make out what’s being said on the other side when speaking at a normal level, the noise problem has to be solved. The rooms require better soundproofing.
- RECOMMENDED TO FIX: If the room-to-room noise is loud enough that people can make out noise, but can’t understand what’s being said – we would still recommend a fix to avoid distractions. Additional soundproofing materials will also prevent any sounds from being too noticeable if the noise level rises above a regular speaking voice.
We understand that solving these problems in a commercial building where you are a tenant is not always easy, and can require working with the landlord. We have a variety of solutions depending on your building’s specific constraints, and will make sure any soundproofing you do install will actually work.
Steps to Soundproof a Therapist Office
- If you have a dropped ceiling, check if the walls go all the way to the true roof or stop where the dropped ceiling starts. In most cases, you need to upgrade your ceiling tiles.
- Seal up any gaps in the wall with acoustical sealant. Common weak points are behind the plastic base molding, outlets, and light switches.
- Add a Sound Lock Door Seal Kit to soundproof a solid core door.
- Install an appropriate number of acoustic panels inside the room to absorb some of the noise inside. Acoustic panels or foam will not stop sound from entering or exiting the room, but are a helpful final step after completing steps 1 through 3.
There are three main areas of a room to focus on when it comes to soundproofing a therapist's office: the walls, the door, and the ceiling. If there are windows letting outside noise into the room, we would recommend treating those as well.
Let’s take a quick detour here though, and talk about foam. We have run into plenty of professionals who attempt to solve their room-to-room noise issue with acoustic panels or acoustic foam. This approach never works, because foam will not prevent sound from entering or exiting the room. We have a whole article on how foam doesn’t block sound if you’d like to go deeper.
Step #1: Soundproof a Dropped Ceiling in a Therapist Office
A big problem in the types of commercial buildings a therapist office is in is the ceiling, specifically a dropped ceilings. The problem with a dropped ceiling is that the walls of the room typically do not go all the way to the “true” ceiling above – they stop where the ceiling tiles are. Because your typical ceiling tiles block sound about as well as a piece of cardboard, the sound in one room is going right up over the wall and into the adjacent room.
Option 1: Install Ceiling Tiles That Are Rated To Block Sound
Standard dropped ceiling tiles are not good at blocking sound, so you need to either install soundproof dropped ceiling tiles or ceiling tile backers. Our BlocknZorbe ceiling tiles are STC rated to block sound, and can either replace existing tiles or be laid on top. We also have CelluZorbe HD Backer Board, which is an extremely cost-effective ceiling tile backer that can be glued to the existing ceiling tiles, significantly improving the soundproofing performance.
Option 2: Replace With Drywall
Depending on the level of soundproofing you need and the noise level, you may need to consider a drywall ceiling. There might be a few different office noise reduction solutions that would work best for you – please reach out to one of our Second Skin noise experts to discuss further options!
Step #2: Soundproofing Therapist Office Walls
The walls of a room are the primary barrier separating two rooms. In a commercial building, the most common problem we see with walls is that they are not well sealed. Sound behaves a lot like water, it finds the weakest point and travels through that opening. If a wall is not properly sealed, sound will “leak” into adjacent spaces.
If you can see obvious gaps in the wall, you need to seal them. Gaps that aren’t so obvious need to be sealed as well. The most common ones are behind the plastic base molding and any penetrations in the wall (outlets, switches, etc).
Depending on the situation, we may sometimes recommend going beyond sealing up the wall with Green Glue and an additional layer of 5/8” drywall. In most situations though, we just need to use acoustical sealant to seal gaps in the wall and upgrade the soundproofing of the dropped ceiling tiles.
Step #3: Door Soundproofing for Your Office Door
The door of a therapist's office is a weak point in the wall. Even if the wall is properly soundproofed, there will still be a good amount of sound transmission if you don’t treat the door.
First, check that the door is a solid core door and not a hollow core door. If it's a hollow core door, rip it off immediately and send it far away! Hollow core doors don’t have the density to block sound. Fortunately, most commercial buildings will have solid core doors. Read our article on our door soundproofing principles and recommendations.
A major soundproofing problem area with doors is the gaps around the perimeter. Remember earlier when we said sound flows like water and will find any and every crevice to transfer through? A door can have up to one square foot of airspace around it, so we have to seal that gap! Our Sound Lock Door Seal Kit combines adjustable jamb seals with an automatic bottom seal that drops down when the door closes. The kit will add up to 20 STC points to the door, while allowing the door to operate completely normally!
If your office has high soundproofing needs, consider our SoundLock™ Soundproof Door!