Impulsive moves

How do you prevent yourself from making impulsive moves?  Even when you sit there studying a move forever, don't you just sometimes all of sudden make a move.  It's like you're watching someone else move.  After the move is made, you just sit staring at the move wondering "why did I do that"?  Here's the real question: what makes us make impulsive moves and how do we calm down?  

Purpose (What was my opponents move for?)

Threat (What threats have been created?)

Candidate moves & Calculation (Find 3 candidate moves and calculate)

Review (Is my chosen move hanging anything?)

 I like this, lochness88.  It provides structure to that breathless moment.  I'm going to try this.

Moves are only impulsive when they don't work :)  The rest of the time it's called INTUITION. 

Just a thought :P 

Sometimes it helps to make a mental list of all the opponent's legal moves and visualize them on the board. That way you don't overlook an unexpected moves. The human brain is very good at filtering out information that it doesn't think it needs. So you look at a chess board and your brain automatically picks out the  moves it thinks are relevant. Over time we train ourselves to only focus on moves we think are relevant, otherwise the problem would simply be unwieldy.

Making a mental list of all your opponent's legal moves (good or bad) will help you to see moves the brain might filter and it will also slow you down a bit from making impulsive moves. 

this sounds nice i'll use it too, but you also have to mention the next move of your opponent. In my opinion its very important to look forward.