A simple, powerful guide to the seven levels that shape your mind, body, and behaviour.
Most people try to understand themselves by focusing on one part at a time — their thoughts, their emotions, their habits, or their relationships. But human behaviour doesn’t come from one place. It emerges from multiple interacting levelsinside your system.
The Multi-Level Nervous System Framework™ offers a clear, integrative lens to understand how all these levels work together — and why your reactions, patterns, and experiences make perfect sense once you see the full picture.
This is not about diagnosing yourself.
It’s about understanding yourself.
Why Look Through a Multi-Level Lens?
Because no single part of you tells the whole story.
You don’t just think.
You don’t just feel.
You don’t just react.
You experience all of these at once — across seven interconnected levels.
When you view yourself through this lens, your behaviours and emotions stop feeling confusing or random. Instead, they become predictable patterns that can finally be understood and worked with.
The Seven Levels That Shape Your Experience
The Multi-Level Nervous System Framework™ organises human functioning into seven distinct but interdependent layers. Together, they form the full “map” of your inner world.
1. Neurophysiological Level
Your foundational survival system — heart rate, breath, vagus nerve, stress responses.
This is where states like fight, flight, freeze, or calm begin.
2. Somatic Level
The physical expression of your inner state — posture, muscle tension, micro-movements, sensory cues.
3. Emotional Level
How emotions arise, move through the body, or become blocked.
This level shapes the tone of your inner experience.
4. Cognitive Level
Your thoughts, interpretations, beliefs, and the meanings you attach to experiences.
5. Psychological Level
Your deeper patterns — schemas, identity, internal parts, attachment wounds, and the stories you carry.
6. Social / Relational Level
How your system responds around others — boundaries, communication, trust, co-regulation, attachment dynamics.
7. Energetic / Spiritual Level
Your sense of direction, purpose, values, alignment, and connection beyond the self.
These seven levels are not separate boxes.
They are layers of one integrated system, each influencing the others.
Why This Matters for Understanding Yourself
When you feel overwhelmed, reactive, shut down, or confused by your own behaviour, it’s rarely happening on one level alone.
A stressful moment may cause:
- your heart rate to rise (neurophysiological)
- your shoulders to tense (somatic)
- anxiety to build (emotional)
- thoughts to spiral (cognitive)
- old stories to reactivate (psychological)
- communication to shift (relational)
- your sense of connection to dim (energetic/spiritual)
When you view these experiences through the lens of the Multi-Level Nervous System Framework™, you can finally see how everything is connected.
Instead of asking,
“What’s wrong with me?”
You begin asking,
“What level is activated — and what needs support?”
This is the beginning of clarity, compassion, and change.
What You Can Do With This Insight
Understanding yourself through this seven-level lens helps you:
- recognise your own regulation patterns
- understand why certain reactions happen
- see your triggers with more compassion and less shame
- respond instead of react
- communicate more clearly
- strengthen relationships
- know which level actually needs attention
- choose the right tools for the right problem
- create change that lasts
You stop fighting yourself.
You start working with your system.
A Kinder, More Accurate Way to Understand Who You Are
At its core, the Multi-Level Nervous System Framework™ gives you a coherent way to understand your whole self — not just the parts that feel loudest in the moment.
It helps you see:
- why you feel what you feel
- why you react the way you do
- why certain patterns return under stress
- where your growth edge is
- how to shift from survival to safety
- how to build capacity, coherence, and connection
It’s not about becoming a different person.
It’s about understanding the person you already are — with more clarity, compassion, and precision.
Want to Go Deeper?
If you want to explore this model further:
👉 Read the full introduction to the Multi-Level Nervous System Framework™
👉 Join the WWAX newsletter for programs, articles, and guided practices
Your nervous system isn’t something you need to fight.
It’s a system you can learn to understand — layer by layer.