A wireless station is disclosed that may quickly enter and/or exit a sleep state and that may reduce power consumption associated with waking up from the sleep state to perform selected low power operations by performing such operations using a set of first instructions stored within an internal memory of the station's processor. If more complex operations such as processing downlink data received from an access point are subsequently desired, then the processor may jump to execution of a set of second instructions stored in an external memory that is coupled to the processor.