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MEET the UK’s first Doctor of Happiness, who claims he can help you beat the January blues.

The nation is heading back to work feeling sluggish, bloated and skint from Christmas.

But Dr Andy Cope reckons he can change all that. And he’s here to let lucky Daily Star readers into his secret: “Life is too short – make a change now.”

So whether it’s money worries, health, relationships, politics or more keeping you awake at night – Andy can help.

As the first person to ever study what makes humans blissfully happy, Andy, 51, from Derbyshire, spent 12 years at university developing his theory. And with a PhD under his belt is now the UK’s official first Dr Happiness.

He explains: “I was studying Psychology at Loughborough University but there was always something missing for me.

“I studied the usual disorders and ailments, but I realised, why are we constantly studying what’s wrong with people to try to fix them?

“Why don’t we ever study people who already feel genuinely amazing and positive and work out how to bottle that instead?

“So I decided to flip psychology on its head and rather than try to look at ill people to cure them, I realised no-one had ever studied happy people to find out why they aren’t?”

But it wasn’t as easy as he first thought. “Qualifying who is truly happy was the hard bit,” he reveals. “Everyone has a natural high point and a natural low point, so I was plotting people on a graph who’d been consistently happy on a long-term basis.

“There’s only about 2% of the population who are already genuinely happy, have amazing energy and who you feel great when you’re around them.

“I spent two years getting the wrong people. I had a questionnaire where people had to grade themselves so I went after those who’d scored eight or above. But then I found them completely deluded. They weren’t creating happiness in other people.

“So they needed to be eight or above as well as making other people happy and rate yourself happy on the Oxford Questionnaire, which is a tried-andtested scale.

“Flourishing is when your happiness creates upward scales of positive emotion in other people and that is the most important bit to qualify it.” Brits are some of the biggest miserable moaners in the world, Andy says. We even enjoy it! “Moaning is a national habit,” he says. “But it’s a learned behaviour because everyone else is having a bit of a moan. But then it rubs off on other people and can cause you to be depressed.

“Brits, on average, spend most of our time in the bottom third of the happiness scale.

“In fact, the international tables of happiness are hardly ever shown here in the UK because we are so low down. There are a lot of other countries who are poorer and have worse weather than us which are happier. “The top 2% in my research do have a moan occasionally but not in a way that negatively impacts on others.

“And they have internal strategies to rethink how they feel about bad traffic, awful weather – anything.

“Happiness can only come from your own thinking. We’re fooled into thinking it comes from new shoes, holidays or other people. It doesn’t.

“All the time we are looking at advertisements chasing happiness in things like a pot of emotional goal at the end of a never-ending rainbow.

“My theory is that happiness is already here. You just need to spot it.

“It’s all in your head and how you choose to look at things.

“Here in Britain we’re overworked, underpaid, angry about Brexit, unhappy about the weather and jealous of everyone who we think is living a better life than us.

“But we don’t do anything about it. “Put simply, we work to pay the bills, to buy stuff we don’t need and to impress people we don’t like.

“STOP! Now is the time to change.”