Due to the poor transportability of sodium ions, conventional sodium ion batteries (SIBs) cannot deliver sufficient capacity for high rate applications. Surface-induced capacitive processes (SCP) (e.g. capacitance and pseudocapacitance) could provide fast charge/discharge capacity in conjunction with the capacity provided by diffusion-controlled intercalation processes (DIP) to address this issue. For the first time, SCP was used to design a hierarchical layered graphene composite as an anode material for high rate SIBs. The contributions of the individual sodium storage processes were quantitatively evaluated, verifying the proposed mechanism. The resultant SCP-enhanced SIB delivers an outstanding rate capacity of 120mAh/g at 10A/g, which is among best of the state-of-the-art carbon-based SIBs. It also demonstrates exceptional cycling stability, retaining 83.5% capacity of 142mAh/g at 0.5A/g after 2500 cycles.