Phpmyadmin access denied every time ubuntu restarts

I have a xampp installation on my ubuntu machine. And I am trying to use phpmyadmin to access mysql. But every time I start xampp and try to open phpmyadmin I get an error that says mysqli::real_connect(): (HY000/2002): Connection refused. I have read some questions and changing mysql password seems to fix this. But I don’t want to change mysql password every time I restart my pc. Is there any way to fix this? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks