Technologies to manage pain ideally require a way to measure to the objective behavioural impact of pain in someones daily life, as a proxy for the subjective felt sense of pain (which is the target of treatment in clinical contexts). This is a hard problem, but insight derives from the fact that ultimately, pain evolved to serve a core protective and recuperative function. The challenge here is that most of our models of pain behaviour come from highly contrived laboratory experimental contexts, and this illustrates the need to extend this to more realistic everyday contexts that can provide a basis for clinical application. I will outline how we are now addressing this problem, both theoretically (e.g. models of free-operant decision-making) and experimentally (using virtual reality).